73
INTENTIO SPIRITUS: 
THE MATERIALIST, 
PNEUMATOLOGICAL 
ORIGINS OF INTENTION IN 
AUGUSTINE
Alberto Parisi
O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta
e intendente te ami e arridi!
(Dante)
1
Today, the concept of intention is said and thought to have nothing 
to do with air. A catchword of 20th-century Western philosophy, posi-
tively or negatively, intention takes a central role in numerous continen-
tal as well as analytic traditions, as a fundamental element of conscious, 
subjective life. Stripped to the essentials, today intention can have two 
meanings, whose lines of delimitation are blurred: (1) famously in the 
phenomenological tradition – but this meaning is prevalent also outside 
it – it stands for the most basic characteristic of consciousness, which 
is always already intending, namely directed towards, an object;
2
 (2) in 
ordinary language, on which analytic philosophy bases itself, it stands 
for the voluntary, futural purposes and designs of humans, something 
strictly related to the will.
3 
1
  “O’ eternal light that alone in yourself lie, / yourself only intend, and by yourself understood 
/ and intending yourself love and smile to.” Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. Natalino 
Sapegno, 3 vol. (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1968), vol. 3, "Paradiso XXXIII," 423–424.
2
  Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser 
(Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1963), 70–72; Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford 
University Press, 2003), 7–42. 
3
  Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “intention.” The most famous 20th-century work, which 
reawakened the problem of intention for Analytic philosophy, is G. E. M. Anscombe’s Inten-
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2023.398 Poligrafi, no. 111/112, vol. 28, 2023, pp. 73 –120

POLIGrAFI
74
The history of this term too, or its possible genealogy, on which 
scholars have been debating without pause for almost seventy years, 
does not mention breath in the slightest. It goes something like this: 
the two aforementioned ideas of intentionality have a common origin, 
namely the intentio of Medieval Scholasticism (in the case of Husserl, 
the mediator is, as most people in this tradition know, the psycholo-
gist Franz Brentano).
4
 Yet, in Scholasticism, intentio was not a univo-
cal term and they were aware of it.
5
 For example, Alain de Libera and 
r émi Brague have stressed a fascinating side of this story, namely that, 
among their various uses of intentio, the Scholastics also used this word 
to translate ma’na, the Arabic term used by Ibn Sinna (Avicenna) to 
talk about the concept in the mind.
6
 But before this shift took place, 
through Islamic philosophy, the story goes that the Scholastics received 
the fundamental meaning of intentio from one Church Father in par-
ticular: Augustine. It is with Augustine, it has been argued, that the ori-
gins of intention can be found.
7
 It is in Augustine’s intentio animi that 
tion, followed by Donald Davidson’s studies: G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1957); Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1980); Kieran Setiya, “Intention,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 
eds. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Winter 2022 Edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/win2022/entries/intention/. 
4
  For a recent, complete account of the history of the different meanings of the term inten-
tion in European culture see Alain de Libera, “Intention,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A 
Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, trans. Steven r endall et al. (Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 2014), 500–511.
5
  See in this regard Jean-Luc Solère, “Tension et intention: Esquisse de L’histoire d’une 
notion,” in Questions sur I’intentionnalité, eds. Lambros Couloubaritsis and Antonin Mazzù 
(Bruxelles: Éditions OUSIA, 2007), 115.
6
  De Libera, “Intention,” 505–506; r émi Brague, “Intentio and ma’na,” in Dictionary of Un-
translatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, trans. Steven r endall et al. (Princeton: 
Princeton University Press, 2014), 506.
7
  “The couple ‘intention’/‘attention’ (which corresponds also to the English ‘directedness’) 
was attested, in exemplary fashion, in St. Augustine’s analysis of visual sensation.” De Libera, 
“Intention,” 502. Many are the studies that traced the modern European concept of intention-
ality back to Augustine. The first was Herbert Spiegelberg, “Der Begriff der Intentionalität in 
der Scholastik, bei Brentano, und bei Husserl,” Philosophische Hefte 5 (1936): 75–91. The idea 
has then been discussed implicitly or explicitly many times: Jean r ohmer, “L’intentionnalité 
des sensations chez Saint Augustin,” in Augustinus Magister: Congrès international augustinien, 
Paris 21–24 Septembre 1954, vol. 1, ed. Fulbert Cavré (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1954), 
491–498; Sofia Vanni r ovighi, “La fenomenologia della sensazione in Sant’Agostino,” Rivista 
di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 54, no. 1 (1962): 18–32; richard Sorabji, “From Aristotle to Bren -

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
75
one can find intention as the ability of the soul to turn itself towards 
things or towards itself, which is to say to turn one’s attention to some-
thing; it is with Augustine that this same idea becomes a synonym for 
that faculty of the soul on which he, later in his life, founded his whole 
theology, namely the will.
Nowhere in this story does air or breath make an appearance. But is 
this really the case? In this article, I do not wish to argue this genealogy 
to be wrong, but rather to claim that it has stopped too early and that, 
at the same time, it has underestimated the larger historical and philo-
sophical context – a pneumatological one
8
 – in which Augustine was 
writing and in which he developed his conception of intention. 
Indeed, on the one hand, in the last century Augustine scholars have 
not stopped at Augustine’s text but have rather tried to discover where 
Augustine’s intentio itself came from, unearthing new information that 
is pivotal for the whole history of intention but which is not usual-
ly taken into consideration. What has been found is that Augustine’s 
intentio could derive from the Ancient Stoic concept of τόνος (tonos, 
tension or tone), the material tension or vibration of the spirit founda-
tional to Stoic gnoseology and psychology.
9
 
On the other hand, these scholars have also conducted their research 
without paying attention at all to the importance air and breath played 
in Augustine’s works.
10
 All of them have worked as if in the dark in 
tano: The Development of the Concept of Intentionality,” in Supplementary Supplement: Aris-
totle and the Later Tradition, eds. Henry Blumenthal and Howard r obinson (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1991), 227–260; Victor Caston, “Connecting Traditions: Augustine and the 
Greeks on Intentionality,” in Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality , ed. Dominik Perler 
(Boston: Brill, 2001), 23–48; Solère, “Tension et intention,” 77; Victor Caston, “Intentional-
ity in Ancient Philosophy,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eds. Edward N. Zalta 
and Uri Nodelman, Fall 2008 Edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/
intentionality-ancient/. 
8
  Against Christian theological practice, which uses the term pneumatology for the doctrine 
of the Holy Spirit, in my work I use pneumatological (from the Ancient Greek πνεῦμα, pneuma, 
namely breath) to define any discourse that assumes the spirit and the soul to be as corporeal 
as the rest of reality and understands the spirit primarily as air, breath, voice, smells and every 
other aerial phenomenon, such as wind, breeze, storms, etc.
9
  r ohmer, “L’intentionnalité,” 497; Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1987), 43–45; Solère, “Tension et intention,” 59–90.
10
  My work here follows a new research movement that has been rediscovering and exploring 
the importance of air and breath in philosophy, as well as in the most diverse disciplines and 

POLIGrAFI
76
regard to Gerard Verbeke’s conclusion, in his L’ évolution de la doctrine 
du Pneuma du stoïcisme à saint Augustin from 1945, that it is with Au-
gustine that the pneuma or spiritus becomes, in the history of European 
culture, finally spiritualised, which means completely detached from 
material air.
11
 A new study of Augustine’s texts, which seriously con-
siders both the pneumatological context in which Augustine (and the 
Stoics) wrote and the extant, although unheeded, studies of the origins 
of intentio in the Stoic concept of tonos, will show that air and breath 
played a role in the history of intention, and a central one at that.
As it is well known, the foundational event of Augustine’s philoso-
phy and theology is the discovery of the libri platonici, the Neo-Platon-
ist books he read around 386 CE, probably in Marius Victorinus’ trans-
lation.
12
 Or rather, the discovery to which Augustine arrived thanks to 
them: the immaterial nature of God and the soul. Everything we read 
by Augustine has been thought and written after this original event 
and Augustine’s whole philosophy can be read as a concatenated series 
of arguments in favour of this fundamental thesis. If this statement is 
clear and has been clear for many centuries, what this study will show is 
cultures. To give a few fundamental references: Yuho Hisayama, Erfahrungen des ki – Leibess-
phäre, Atmosphäre, Pansphäre: Eine transkulturelle Phänomenologie der Sphären (Baden-Baden: 
Karl Alber, 2014); Lenart Škof, Breath of Proximity: Intersubjectivity, Ethics and Peace (Dor-
drecht: Springer, 2015); Magdalena Górska, Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of 
Vulnerability (Linköping: Linköping University, 2016); Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson, eds., 
Atmospheres of Breathing (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018); Lorenzo Marinucci, Forms of the Wind: 
Air and Atmosphere in Modern Japanese Aesthetics (PhD Diss., Università di r oma “Tor Ver-
gata,” 2019); Petri Berndtson, Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing: The Respiratory Primacy 
of Being (New York: r outledge, 2023).
11
  Verbeke’s conclusion is that the final transformation of the spiritus into something com-
pletely immaterial takes place with Christianity, which brings together the immaterialism typi-
cal of Neo-Platonism and the conception of the pneuma they found in the Judeo-Christian 
scriptures. Indeed, as Verbeke shows, the word pneuma in Neo-Platonism still has a material 
meaning, whose most fascinating development can be found in Synesius’ conception of the 
imagination in his treatise on dreams. Gérard Verbeke, L’èvolution de la doctrine du pneuma, 
du stoïcisme à s. Augustin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1945), 489–510; Synesius, On Prophecy, 
Dreams and Human Imagination: Synesius, De insommniis, eds. Donald A. r ussel and Heinz-
Gunther Nesselrath (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).
12
  Augustine, Conf., VII.9.13; see also Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2000), 70–92. Note: references for Augustine’s texts cited in 
this essay and their English translations can be found in the abbreviation section preceding the 
bibliography.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
77
1) the central role played in this process by the word and the concepts 
of intentio and 2) that this very process coincided with the “spiritualisa-
tion of the spirit”
13
 – in Verbeke’s terms – or in other words, with the 
rejection of materialist, pneumatological theories, in which Augustine 
himself used to believe earlier in his life. To prove that the soul or God 
were immaterial meant for him to prove that they were not something 
like a breath pervading the whole body or the whole world in a corpo-
real manner with a certain material intention.
As I will show, it is always through intentio, in a way or another, that 
Augustine demonstrated the immateriality of the soul or even – but 
the two problematics are strictly correlated – the nature of the Une and 
Triune God. It is by making of intentio a synonym of attentio first and 
voluntas later that Augustine was able to prove the immateriality of per-
ception and thought, namely soul and God, which just meant to prove 
that soul and God are not breath. 
Thus, having shown that intention in Augustine is the concept that 
allows the spirit to become immaterial, thus bringing to conclusion the 
“spiritualisation of the spirit,” I will take seriously the genealogical the-
ory according to which Augustine’s intentio is said to descend from the 
Ancient Stoic tonos, to show that this is not exactly the case. Augustine’s 
intentio had to do fundamentally with the Stoic tonos but not in the 
way critics have argued. Augustine was not borrowing the term intentio 
from the Stoics but, rather, he was stealing it, repurposing it to his own 
spiritualist ends. This is the reason why, after him, no Stoic, materialist, 
or pneumatological account of intentio was anywhere to be found. 
Thus, Augustine’s intentio, unexplainable through any Neo-Platonist 
precedent – in fact, there are no direct Neo-Platonist correspondents to 
it – betrays the underlying presence of another conception of intentio, 
a materialist, pneumatological conception, which Augustine knew and 
to which perhaps he even subscribed before his conversion to Neo-
Platonism and then to Christianity, but of which we have lost almost 
every trace. I will conclude by pointing to some of these traces, in view 
of a future reconstruction of the material intention of the spirit.
13
  Verbeke, L ’èvolution de la doctrine du pneuma, 3. 

POLIGrAFI
78
Augustine’s Early T reatises as Anti-Pneumatological Texts
Augustine’s early dialogues and treatises are indispensable for this 
research because they testify to Augustine’s early enthusiasm after his 
conversion, first to Neo-Platonism and then to Christianity, for the 
immaterialist thesis. Thus, they reveal somewhat more clearly than later 
works certain theoretical enemies Augustine never stopped fighting: 
namely, materialist theories and often materialist theories of a very spe-
cific kind. Indeed, if we take the titles and objectives of his two early 
works on the soul this becomes immediately clear. To prove that the 
soul is immortal, as he wishes to do in his De immortalitate animae (On 
the Immortality of the Soul), and that the soul has no extension, as he 
does in the De quantitate animae (On the Quantity or Magnitude of the 
Soul), he simply aims to disprove that the soul is or can be a body. The 
two texts are just a collection of counterarguments against the subtle 
and probably at the time pervasive theories of the materialists.
14
 
Judging from the texts in question, the materialist theories of the 
soul that must have attracted the most interest at the time are two 
and both had a long tradition: 1) the Pythagorean, musical concep-
tion of the soul as the harmonia of the body, at times confused with 
the Aristotelian conception of the soul as the form of the body;
15
 and 
2) the Stoic but also generally Ancient Greek and Judaic idea that the 
soul was just a breath (spiritus), or even a wind (ventus), where the 
latter ratifies even more the identity between corporeal breath within 
human beings and the spirit outside them.
16
 Yet both theories must 
have been in some way connected in a world that understood music, 
and not wrongly, as a fundamentally aerial or pneumatic phenom-
14
  The fact that all of Augustine’s texts, both the early ones and less explicitly the later ones, as 
well as many other texts from the same period, such as Mamertus’ De statu animae, set out ev-
ery time to reject materialist theories and, in particular, the theory that the soul is just a breath 
prove how pervasive these conceptions must have been at the time. Claudianus Mamertus, De 
statu animae, in Opera, ed. August Engelbrecht (Vienna: C. Geroldi filium, 1885), 1.7. See 
also T ertullian, Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani De anima, ed. J. H. Waszink (Leiden: Brill, 
2010), par. 5–10; (also in Hans von Arnim, ed., Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, 4 vol. (Leipzig: 
Teubner, 1903–1924), II.773;784; hereafter referenced as SVF.).
15
  Augustine, Im. an., 2.2.
16
  Augustine, Qu. an., 4.6.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
79
enon.
17
 Augustine, whose conversion to Platonism taught him one, 
irrevocable tenet, namely that the soul and God are immaterial, tries 
to disprove both of these theories in the two texts respectively. 
It is in his De quantitate animae, however, that Augustine reveals 
his counterarguments to be strictly connected to his response to cer-
tain specific materialist theories, namely pneumatological ones. In the 
De immortalitate animae, to prove that the soul was immortal meant 
disproving that the soul could simply be a harmony of the body and 
therefore be or depend on a body. Instead, at the beginning of this dia-
logue on the quantity or magnitude of the soul, to prove that the soul 
has no extension, which for Augustine is like saying that it is something 
immaterial, means to disprove all those theories that claim the soul to 
be just a breath, or even a wind:
18
17
  The two theories are strictly identified and associated with the Stoics and the Epicureans 
in passage 26.13 from Alexander of Aphrodisias’s De anima: “In contrast, the soul would be a 
harmony, or a harmonious composition of certain bodies, for those who make the soul out of a 
specific kind of mixture and composition of things. This group includes the Stoics, who claim 
that the soul is breath composed in a certain way from fire and air. It also includes the Epicure-
ans […]” Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Soul [De anima], ed. and trans. Victor Caston (New 
York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 26.13; also in SVF, II.786. But the connection is made powerfully 
explicit by Cicero, in a passage from the Tusculanae: “Others however identify soul [animus] 
and breath [anima] as we r omans practically do […] Zeno the Stoic holds the soul to be fire. 
Now the views I have mentioned, that the soul is heart, brain, life or fire are those ordinarily 
held: the remaining views are as a rule peculiar to individual thinkers, just as philosophers of 
old held individual views long ago, but nearest in date to our time there was Aristoxenus, mu-
sician as well as philosopher, who held the soul to be a special tuning up of the natural body 
[ipsius corporis intentionem quondam] analogous to that which is called harmony in vocal and 
instrumental music; answering to the nature and conformation of the whole body, vibrations of 
different kinds are produced just as sounds are in vocal music.” Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 
trans. John Edward King (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), I.19; see also Solère, 
“T ension et intention,” 62. r egarding the relation of music to air: “This is to be expected, since 
sound is a movement of air.” Aristotle, De anima, ed. and trans. r. D. Hicks (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1907), 420c. “For sound is a continuous tuning [ τάσις] of air 
which, after it is taken around inside the objects making the beatings, follows through to the 
outside and therefore, according to how much force there might be in the greater tension of 
those objects through which the beats are made, is made both smaller and higher.” Ptolemy, 
Harmonics, trans. and ed. Jon Solomon (Leiden: Brill, 2000), I.3.8.
18
  English translations of Latin texts can be found in the abbreviation section preceding the 
bibliography. However, some translations might have been modified to better convey the con-
textual meaning of the passages.

POLIGrAFI
80
E. Undoubtedly my view is that it is impossible for bodies to be without 
these three dimensions.
A. What is that? Can you think of these three dimensions existing any-
where except in bodies?
E. I do not see how they can be elsewhere.
A. Therefore, you think that the soul is simply a body?
E. If we admit that even the wind [ventus] is a body, I cannot deny that the 
soul seems to be a body, for I think it is something like the wind.
19
To think that the soul is like the wind, like a moving breath, means 
to think that the soul is a body with certain physical dimensions, and 
this is what this treatise is about to disprove. The De quantitate animae 
is an anti-pneumatological text.
The Soul-Body Problem as a Problem of Mixture 
Augustine’s main argument for the immateriality of the soul in this 
dialogue has clear Neo-Platonist undertones. To disprove that the soul 
has no physical extension he turns to the power of memory and rea-
son, and claims the soul must have no extension for us to perceive 
and think.
20
 Put simply, if perceptions and thoughts – what the soul 
eminently produces and is made of – were corporeal, then how could 
someone think of or remember things that are much bigger than one-
self? However, such an understanding of the soul creates the fundamen-
tal problem of the difference or rather of the chasm between soul and 
body. More than Augustine’s complicated and lengthy study of geom-
etry from this dialogue, which he takes to resolve this issue and only 
partially, we are interested in the theory that he is rejecting and that 
did not present this problem. rather, the pneumatological, materialist 
theory that Augustine is attacking resolved it through its own under-
19
  “E. Prorsus non dubito corpora omnia his carere non posse. / A. Quid illud? Potes cogitare 
ista tria non esse nisi in corporibus? / E. Non intellego quomodo alibi esse possint. / A. Ergo ani-
mam non putas esse aliud quam corpus? / E. Si etiam ventum corpus esse confitemur, negare non 
possum corpus mihi animam videri: nam tale aliquid eam esse cogito.” Augustine, Qu. an., 4.6. 
20
  This is the Neo-Platonist counterargument that, besides the theory of mixture, aimed to 
reject the Stoic conception, a development of Aristotle’s theory of perception, according to 
which when perceiving, the animus received a physical imprint of the objects perceived. Augus-
tine, Qu. an., 8–23.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
81
standing of the soul as a form of temperatio, to use Augustine’s term 
from the De immortalitate animae:
21
 to understand the soul as a breath 
or a wind means to understand the soul as itself a body pervading the 
body of the human being and thus mixed with it. As Jean Pépin has 
shown in a famous essay, although rather implicitly, Augustine is here 
following the Neo-Platonist Porphyry in trying to disprove the Stoic 
theory that soul and the body form a corporeal mixture.
22
 
The Stoic theory is worth repeating, even if it does not appear ex-
plicitly in Augustine’s text. Taking inspiration from the Aristotelian ac-
count of different kinds of unity in bodies, the Stoics proposed their 
own updated catalogue.
23
 The simplest one counts three kinds of mix-
tures: 1) juxtaposition or connection, when two or more substances are 
juxtaposed to one another without losing any of their own qualities, 
like in a heap of grain or sand; 2) fusion, namely when two or more 
substances blend together to such a point that none of their original 
qualities are left and a completely different substance is created, as in 
the case of medicaments; and finally, 3) a proper mixture, namely when 
two or more substances penetrate one another completely without los-
ing their own qualities, since one would be able to separate them again, 
as in the case of a mixture of water and wine, which can be separated 
thanks to a sponge imbibed with oil.
24
 
It is on the basis of such an understanding of mixture that the Stoics 
justified their conception of the soul as breath. The soul is able to pen -
etrate or diffuse completely through the body like wine and water do, 
in a mixture. In the words of Alexander of Aphrodisia in whose version 
we have received this Stoic theory:
They employ as clear evidence that this is the case: the fact that the soul 
which has its own substantiality, just like the body that receives it, is diffused 
[διήκειν] throughout the whole of the body while preserving its own substan-
21
  Augustine, Im. an., 10.17. 
22
  Jean Pépin, “Une nouvelle source de saint Augustin: le ζήτημα de Porphyre Sur l’union de 
l’âme et du corps,” Revue des Études Anciennes 66, no. 1–2 (1964): 56–89.
23
  Aristotle, On Coming-T o-Be and Passing-Away (De generatione et corruptione), ed. and trans. 
H. H. Joachim (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), 327b–328b.
24
  Alexander of Aphrodisias, De mixtione, published as Alexander of Aphrodisias on Stoic Phys-
ics, ed. and trans. r obert B. Todd (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 216.1–218.1; also in SVF, II.473. 

POLIGrAFI
82
tiality in the mixture with it (for there is nothing in the body possessing the 
soul that does not partake of the soul).
25
Since mixtures exist in nature, then the Stoics believe they can envi-
sion the relationship between soul and body as the relationship between 
two bodies that they call a mixture. The soul remains the soul while 
being completely diffused through the body.
And this is precisely the theory Augustine is here trying to disprove. 
First, there is the famous example, already discussed by Pépin,
26
 of the 
soul filling the body like a waterskin: “A. Now, you do not think your 
soul exists anywhere except in your body, do you? / E. No, I don’t. / A. Is 
the soul inside the body only, like the contents of a waterskin, so to say, 
or only on the outside, like a covering, or do you think it is both inside 
and outside [et intrinsecus et extrinsecus]?”
27
 This image can be found in 
one of Porphyry’s Σύμμικτα ζητήματα (symmikta zetemata) on the union 
of body and soul, which have been reconstructed.
28
 Pépin links such 
an analogy to Democritus and Epicurus through a further reference he 
found in a doxographical passage by Iamblichus, which mentions the 
theory according to which the soul “is disseminated and present in the 
body like the wind is in a waterskin (ἔνεστιν ἡ ψυχὴή τῷ σώματι καθαπερεὶ 
ἀσκῷ πνεῦμα)” in conjunction with the Democriteans.
29
 And yet, then 
Pépin goes on to explain that this specific ζήτημα (zetema) of Porphyry 
rejects the Stoic theory of mixture and the possibility that soul and 
body could be two bodies mixed together, where the first body is un-
derstood exactly like pneuma, a breath or a wind.
30
 But besides this im-
portant analogy, Augustine himself goes on to discuss the issue in terms 
extremely similar to the ones we read in Alexander. 
Indeed, the problem is a bit later in the treatise presented by Au-
gustine as a problem of distentio which, as we will see, is used by him 
25
  Alexander of Aphrodisias, De mixtione, 217.32; also in SVF, II.473.
26
  Pépin, “Une nouvelle source,” 64–67.
27
  “A. Sed numquidam animam tuam putas esse nisi in corpore tuo? / E. Ita puto. / A. 
Intrinsecus tantum, ut tamquam utrem impleat an tantum forinsecus velut tectorium an et 
intrinsecus et extrinsecus eam esse arbitraris?” Augustine, Qu. an., 7. 
28
  Heinrich Dörrie, Porphyrios’ “Σύμμικτα ζητήματα ”: Ihre Stellung in System und Geschichte 
des Neuplatonismus nebst einem Kommentar zu den Fragmenten (München: Beck, 1959), 80.
29
  Pépin, “Une nouvelle source,” 65. My translation.
30
  Pépin, “Une nouvelle source,” 92–94.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
83
alternatively with the term diffusio, and brings us back to Alexander’s 
formulation: “Then, if the soul is distended [distenditur] through the 
space of the body, why does it not have quantity? If, however, it is not 
distended [distenditur], how does it feel all over anything that strikes 
it?”
31
 That the soul distends through the whole body and has, therefore, 
physical dimensions and is, hence, a body is the materialist theory Au-
gustine is trying to disprove and the one founded on the Stoic concep-
tion of mixture. But if the soul does not distend through the body, if it 
is not a body itself – and Augustine is aware that his theory comes up 
short here – the question becomes: how can the soul sense and perceive 
everywhere and throughout the body, namely wherever the body is 
touched? Through his rejection of the materialist and pneumatological 
theory of the soul, which is based on the aforementioned conception of 
mixture, Augustine has become aware of the issue his and every dualism 
have to confront: the soul-body problem. 
Augustine will try to resolve this issue by giving a new account of 
sensation that is particularly complicated and not worth exploring in 
detail for two reasons: 1) he will give a sounder and more advanced ver-
sion of this argument in his De musica, which we are going to discuss 
in the next section; and 2) because towards the end of this dialogue 
Augustine must almost give up all of his preceding arguments when 
confronted with the materialist counterexample of the centipede. Ac-
cording to this counterargument, if we take a centipede and we cut it 
physically in half or more parts, each part goes on living like nothing 
has happened and, therefore, the soul seems to divide itself with the 
body.
32
 As I said, faced with such a straight-forward dilemma, Augus-
tine almost gives up, but he thinks a particular analogy can here come 
in help: the analogy of signifier and signified. 
Unable to prove in any way that the soul does not get split or cut 
with the body in which it is contained, Augustine decides it is time to 
try something completely different to explain how the soul is in the 
body. He turns to language. How is it that sound and meaning relate 
31
  “Deinde, si per spatium sui corporis anima distenditur, quomodo nullius quantitatis est? 
Si autem non distenditur, quomodo sentit ubique pungentem?” Augustine, Qu. an., 26.
32
  Augustine, Qu. an., 62–64; on the centipede, see O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy, 28–29.

POLIGrAFI
84
to each other in the words we use? Augustine claims that if one analyses 
these elements with enough attention, what we find is that meaning 
and sound are to words, what soul and body are to human beings. They 
are two completely different entities, of which one, the meaning (or the 
soul), always precedes the other; it can exist without the other in the 
mind; and indeed, it exists without dimensions, unlike sound or voice, 
which are divisible in time.
33
 
Furthermore, there are some words that, like the centipede, can be 
divided and still have meaning. Augustine gives the example of the Lat-
in word “lucifer,” the morning star, which can be split into two words, 
and each of them still has a meaning in Latin, “luci” and “fer.” Then, 
what the analogy shows is that it is the voice that is extended in time 
and can be divided and not the meaning. When the word is split into 
two words, the two words still have meaning but the original meaning 
has not been split. There are instead two different meanings. But then 
this implies: 
For, the soul did not occupy a place, but held the body which the soul itself 
moved. Just as the meaning of a word, without being extended in time [non 
distenta per tempus], animated, so to speak, and filled out all the letters that 
take up slight intervals of time [to pronounce].
34
In other words, Augustine believes to have shown, although only by 
analogy, that the soul-body problem can be solved, without the need 
for any conception of material mixture: the meaning and the soul are 
not distended (distenti), physically diffused in time and space or in the 
body but rather govern it in some way. It is only in his De musica, which 
he started around the same time of these dialogues but revised much 
later, that he would find a solution to the soul-body problem in a new 
account of sensation, in which intentio plays the central role.
35
 
33
  Augustine, Qu. an., 66.
34
  “Non enim locum ipsa, sed corpus quod ab eadem agebatur, tenebat: sicut illa significatio 
non distenta per tempus, omnes tamen nominis litteras suas moras ac tempora possidentes, 
velut animaverat atque compleverat.” Augustine, Qu. an., 68.
35
  Intentio is not absent from these early treatises and dialogues, but its role is not as clear yet. 
Therefore, I have preferred to leave these uses aside in this article in order to avoid confusion. 

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
85
Intentio as Attention: Augustine’s Solution 
to the Soul-Body Problem
Augustine’s theory of sensation is, from the beginning, an answer to 
the problem of the relationship between body and soul. And this is the 
reason why when Book VI of the De musica gives an account of sensa-
tion, it seems to begin where Augustine had left off in his De quantitate 
animae. There, he had claimed that the soul is not distended physically 
throughout the body – which means mixed with it – but rather governs 
it. The meaning of this expression had, however, remained obscure. 
Here, instead, Augustine has found a better explanation to it: intentio. 
The formulation that follows has attracted much attention and sparked 
a wide debate, perhaps because to the reader of the De musica it sounds 
almost out of context and, thus, hard to decipher.
36
 And yet read as a 
follow-up to Augustine’s reflections in his previous treatises, its mean-
ing is clear enough: 
For I think the body is animated by the soul only by the intention of 
the doer [intentione facientis]. Nor do I think it is affected in any way by the 
body, but it acts through it and in it as if the body was a divine subject of its 
domination.
37
 
The soul is in the body by dominating it, by governing it, not by 
being affected by it. And all this Augustine summarises with the expres-
sion “intentione facientis” – the only way through which the soul ani-
36
  The debate developed around François-Joseph Thonnard and Guy Finaert’s comment that 
the text here is hard to read and the expression intentione facientis could be translated both as 
“dans un but d’activité” (“in the purpose of an action”) and in a more creationist or theological 
fashion as “selon l’intention du Créateur” (“according to the intention of the Creator”). Al-
though the two underlying conceptions are certainly related, the second interpretation is here 
out of context, as most critics now agree. See also editors’ note 78 in Augustine, Dialogues 
Philosophiques: La musique; De musica libri sex, eds. Guy Finaert and François-Joseph Thonnard 
(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1947), 378–380; r ohmer, “L ’intentionnalité,” 494; Vanni r ovighi, 
“La fenomenologia,” 20–21. A fundamental summary of the debate is in Ubaldo Pizzani, “In-
tentio ed escatologia nel sesto libro del De musica di S. Agostino,” in Interiorità e intenzionalità 
in S. Agostino: Atti del I° e II° Seminario Internazionale del Centro di Studi Agostiniani di Perugia, 
ed. Luigi Alici (r oma: Institutum Patristicum “Augustinianum,” 1990), 43.
37
  “Ego enim ab anima hoc corpus animari non puto, nisi intentione facientis. Nec ab isto 
quidquam illam pati arbitror, sed facere de illo et in illo tamquam subiecto divinitus domina-
tioni suae.” Augustine, Mus. VI.9.

POLIGrAFI
86
mates the body is through “the intention of the doer,” namely through 
the intention of the soul itself. 
At this point, the temptation would be to read this term anachro-
nistically and superimpose onto it the contemporary meaning of in-
tention, reducing it to the wilful purpose of the soul. But we need to 
resist such an urge, not because it might be wrong in the long run, but 
because it might obscure the larger context in which Augustine made 
use of this word. Indeed, we could still doubt this intentio to be related 
in any way to the anti-pneumatological argumentation of the earlier De 
quantitate animae. The two texts might seem too distant, or a link to 
be missing. Why would Augustine himself not explicitly formulate his 
argument the way we are sketching it here: the soul is not in the body 
as a physical distention but rather animates it only through its inten-
tion? And yet in a later letter to Jerome (from around 415 CE) about 
the origin of the soul, this is precisely how Augustine summarised his 
own view:
Furthermore, if it is a characteristic of a body to occupy space with a cer-
tain length, width and height, and for it to be so placed or moved that it fills 
a larger space with the larger part of itself, and a smaller space with a smaller 
part, and for the part to be less than the whole, then the soul is not a body. 
For the soul extends through the whole body to which it imparts life, not by 
a diffusion in space [non locali diffusione] but by a certain life-giving intention 
[quadama vitali intentione]; it is wholly present in every smallest part, not 
less in smaller parts and more in larger ones, but in one place more intent, in 
another more relaxed [alicubi intentius, alicubi remissius], yet wholly present 
in each and all parts.
38
Augustine’s De musica continues the anti-materialist and anti-pneu-
matological argumentation of the De quantitate animae. To claim that 
the soul is in the body as intentio is to disprove that the soul is itself a 
body, a breath or a wind that is distended or diffused throughout the 
38
  “Porro si corpus non est, nisi quod per loci spatium aliqua longitudine, latitudine, altitudi-
ne ita sistitur vel movetur, ut maiore sui parte maiorem locum occupet, et breviore breviorem, 
minusque sit in parte quam in toto, non est corpus anima. Per totum quippe corpus quod 
animat, non locali diffusione, sed quadam vitali intentione porrigitur: nam per omnes eius par-
ticulas tota simul adest, nec minor in minoribus, et in maioribus maior; sed alicubi intentius, 
alicubi remissius, et in omnibus tota, et in singulis tota est.” Augustine, Ep., 166.4.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
87
body. But then what is this vitalis intentio (or this intentio facientis)? The 
expression “alicubi intentius, alicubi remissius” immediately strikes an 
intent reader as worth analysing and it could prove helpful in answering 
our question. Indeed, “alicubi intentius, alicubi remissius” seems to be 
a calque of an expression common in classical musical treatises to indi-
cate the tending and relaxing of the voice.
39
 But it is not in this sense 
that Augustine uses it but rather, this musical expression becomes in his 
theory of sensation a synonym of attentio.
In fact, circling back to his De musica, there Augustine argues that 
an analysis of sensations explicates how the soul is in the body as inten-
tio. After clarifying that the soul is not affected by the body in any way 
but rather dominates it through its own intentio, he goes on to explain 
how sensing therefore happens: our sense organs are touched by exter-
nal objects, but these objects do not touch our soul; rather, our soul can 
become more or less attentive to them: 
In short, it seems to me the soul, when it senses something in the body, is 
not affected in any way by it, but rather it becomes more attentive [attentius] 
to its own affections, and these functions which are felt as easier when in ac-
cordance with their object or more difficult if not, are not unknown to the 
soul: and this whole process is what is called sensing.
40
The expression from letter 166, “in one place more intent, in anoth-
er more relaxed [alicubi intentius, alicubi remissius]” was here expressed, 
quite tellingly, with “rather it becomes more attentive [sed in eius pas-
sionibus attentius agere].” When we sense something, our soul does not 
suffer any change (pati – passionibus), but rather it can become more 
or less attentive to these passions, it is more or less intended in them. 
39
  “It is by the raising, lowering or inflexion of the voice [intentio vocis, remissio, flexus] 
that the orator stirs the emotions of his hearers, and the measure, if I may repeat the term, of 
voice or phrase differs according as we wish to rouse the indignation or the pity of the judge.” 
Quintilian, The institutio oratoria of Quintilian, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler, 4 vol. (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1920–1922), I.10.25. “Because contracting [intentio] the 
chord causes higher noises, relaxing [remissio] it lower ones.” Boethius, De institutione musica, 
ed. Giovanni Marzi (r oma: Istituto italiano per la storia della musica, 1990), IV.5. 
40
  “Et ne longum faciam, videtur mihi anima cum sentit in corpore, non ab illo aliquid pati, 
sed in eius passionibus attentius agere, et has actiones sive faciles propter convenientiam, sive 
difficiles propter inconvenientiam, non eam latere: et hoc totum est quod sentire dicitur.” Au-
gustine, Mus., VI.10.

POLIGrAFI
88
Intentio has here become attentio and this is what differentiates the 
soul from the body, while at the same time keeping them together: the 
first, immaterial, can turn to the other, can attend to the other, mate-
rial. And it is precisely in this mystical sense that sensation is then read 
by Augustine. If to sense is to direct our attention towards our sense 
organs and therefore towards the material world, then to reach God one 
needs to avoid sensation, avert one’s own attention from matter and 
turn it towards God.
41
 When one hears something, one simply intends 
oneself spiritually towards the material sense organs. But in this way the 
external, material world, voices and sounds, lose all meaning and what 
comes first is always the immaterial interiority. It is therefore Augustine 
that makes of intention a dematerialising and desonorising of life. 
Intentio as Will: the Inclusive Exclusion 
of the Pneumatological Theory of the Soul 
Everything changes in Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram. The argu-
ments used by Augustine in this case are not very different from those 
already analysed in this article and yet they present a fundamental dif-
ference: in response also to the pneumatological nature of the biblical 
account of the creation of the human being through God’s breath, Au-
gustine has here completely absorbed parts of the pneumatological the-
ories he was trying to disprove. After disproving that the soul could be 
made of one of the two passive natural elements, namely earth or water, 
Augustine turns once again to air, the element to which the flatus, God’s 
breath, also belongs. His rejection is as extreme as usual, but this time 
we are introduced to another side of the argument, which was missing 
in the previous iterations. This time the possible corporeal nature of the 
soul as a breath diffused or distended (distentio or diffusio) through the 
body is not simply denied in favour of a spiritual intentio. Such a pneu-
matological theory of distended breath is rather accepted but confined 
to the level of the body; it is excluded by being included, which means 
however that for the first time we have a precise and detailed descrip-
tion of what such a pneumatological theory would look like.
41
  Augustine, Mus., VI.12–14. See also Pizzani, “Intentio ed escatologia,” 49–50.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
89
Augustine ascribes such a theory to some anonymous medical doc-
tors, but many of the ideas in question can be traced back to earlier 
Stoic theories, which had developed in parallel to medical theories.
42
 
What the “doctors” have shown is that the human body is not made 
only of earth and water, the passive elements, but also of a certain quan-
tity of air that, contained in the lungs, is then diffused (diffunditur) 
by the heart throughout the body thanks to the veins called arteries.
43
 
Furthermore, precisely like in the case of the Stoic pneuma, some of this 
air is mixed with fire, which gives it some form of heat and luminosity.
44
 
And it is through this luminous air that – the doctors have shown and 
Augustine deems pivotal to retell – we are able to sense anything at all: 
if we are able to see through our eyes is because rays of this luminous 
air reach from our brain through our eyes to the objects we perceive; if 
we are able to hear, taste and smell is because little pipes bring this air 
from the brain to the sense organs; if we are able to feel what we touch 
is because through other canals air is diffused everywhere in our body 
(per cuncta membra diffundant).
45
In contrast to his early arguments for the immateriality of the soul, 
Augustine’s genius in the De Genesi ad litteram is to have absorbed the 
very pneumatological theory he was, from the beginning, trying to re-
42
  In regard to Augustine’s medical knowledge see editors’ note 34 in Augustine, La genèse 
au sens littéral en douze livres / De genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, eds. Paul Agaësse and Aimé 
Solignac (Paris: Declée de Brouwer, 1972), 710–714; as well as Gustave Bardy, “Saint Augustin 
et les médecins,” Année Théologique Augustiniennes 13, no. 3 (1953): 327–346. Indeed, the 
relationship between the Ancient Greek medical pneumatic school and the Stoics is still matter 
of debate. Even if we are prone to accept Max Pohlenz’s claim that the Ancient Stoics actually 
developed certain ideas they found in the medical theory of their time, such as the fundamental 
role of the pneuma, we cannot exclude that Stoic and medical theories then kept influencing 
each another, as the cases of both Seneca and Galen show. Max Pohlenz, Hippokrates und die 
Begründung der wissenschaftlichen Medizin (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1938), 30–80; Max Pohlenz, 
Die Stoa: Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & r uprecht, 
1948), 82–85; Frédéric Le Blay, “Pneumatism in Seneca: An Example of Interaction between 
Physics and Medicine,” in “Greek” and “Roman” in Latin medical texts: studies in cultural change 
and exchange in ancient medicine, ed. Brigitte Maire (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 63–76.
43
  Augustine, Gn. litt., VII.13.20.
44
  SVF, II.442; 443; 841.
45
  Augustine, Gn. litt., VII.13.20

POLIGrAFI
90
ject.
46
 Now air is said to play a fundamental role in perception or even 
in every movement of our body. And yet it has nothing to do with the 
soul because of intentio, or as we read here for the first time, because of 
something that seems for Augustine to be intrinsically linked to inten-
tio, namely voluntas. The materialists are right, without air there would 
be no possibility of any contact with the world outside, no possibility of 
movement, and yet this air is not the soul: “And the air, which is infused 
[infusus] through the nerves, obeys the will in order to move the limbs, 
but is not itself the will.”
47
 This formulation is fascinating: indeed, in-
fusus corresponds here to intentus if, as we have observed numerous 
times, diffusus corresponds to distentus. And in the Latin tradition the 
nervi are what first and foremost “intend,” as Augustine claims in his 
De quantitate animae and could have read also in Lactantius.
48
 Here 
we begin to observe – although it has been happening all along – how 
Augustine must avoid using intentio in a certain traditional, inherited 
sense, to salvage it for his own ends. And indeed, when we will to move 
our body, air is infused in our nerves and is put in tension so as to let 
our limbs move according to our will. But this air is not our soul, it is 
not the will itself, our will is something different from this tension: it 
is intentio.
Even the theory of mixture is now approved and re-interpreted as 
part of his own spiritual understanding of the soul. We are told for the 
46
  In light of this, it will be necessary to update Verbeke’s account of the development of 
pneumatology. If, as he claims, Augustine is indeed the first one for whom the spiritus becomes 
the immaterial spirit, he was able to achieve this only by re-including on another level the ear-
lier materialist understanding of pneuma.
47
  “Et aer, qui nervis infusus est, paret voluntati, ut membra moveat, non autem ipse voluntas 
est.” Augustine, Gn. litt., VII.25. It cannot be stressed enough how pivotal this formulation will 
be for the following millennia of European history. 
48
  Augustine, Qu. an., 38–39. Also in Lactantius: “What of Aristoxenus who denied that 
there is any soul at all, even while it lives in the body? Just as in lyres a pleasing sound and 
melody is effected by a straining of the strings [intentione nervorum] which musicians call har-
mony, so in bodies the power of sensing comes to be from the union of the inward parts and 
the strength of the members.” Lactantius, Divinarum Institutionum Libri Septem, eds. Eberhard 
Heck and Antonie Wlosok, 4 vol. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005–2011), VII.13.2; also in Boethius, 
De institutione musica, I.28. See also Solère, “Tension et intention,” 61–68. In their etymologi-
cal dictionary, Alfred Ernout and Alfred Meillet cite “nervi” (nerves) as one of the main objects 
of the verb intendo. Alfred Ernout and Alfred Meillet, eds., Dictionnaire étymologique de la 
langue latine (Paris: Klincksieck, 2001), s. v. “tendō.”

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
91
first time that intentio is a response to the problem of mixture, because 
it makes possible a new kind of incorporeal mixture, which no longer 
has nothing to do with air:
Since the soul is not of a bodily nature, nor does it fill the body as its local 
space, like water filling a waterskin or a sponge, but in wonderful ways it is 
mixed [commixta] into the body it animates, and with its incorporeal nod [in-
corporeo nutu], so to say, it powers or steers the body with a kind of intention 
[quadam intentione], not with any material engine [non mole] – how much 
less, I am saying, is this “nod” of its will [nutus voluntatis] the subject of local 
movement itself, in order to move the body locally, when it moves the whole 
body through its parts, and only moves some parts locally through others 
which it does not move locally!
49
The soul is in a mixture with the body but a mixture of a new kind, 
a distention based on the incorporeal, immaterial ability that Augustine 
calls “a certain intentio” (quadam intentione non mole) or will (nutus 
voluntatis).
In order to prove the difference between body and soul, which has 
now become explicitly a difference between air and soul, Augustine’s ar-
gumentation rejoins his earlier ones and turns explicitly to the power of 
the soul he calls intentio, the ability of the soul to direct oneself towards 
something or even will something:
For indeed that the soul is one thing and a different one these, its bodily 
services, or instruments, or tools (or whatever else they may more suitably be 
called) becomes clear from this further evidence: very often it turns itself away 
vigorously from everything else with a forceful intention of thought [cogita-
tionis intentio], and it is unaware of the many things before its wide open and 
perfectly healthy eyes; and if the intention is greater [si maior intentio est], 
while walking along he may suddenly stop – withdrawing the commanding 
nod [imperandi nutum] from the ministry of motion by which the feet were 
being set in motion. However, if his intention of thought [cogitationis inten-
tio] is not quite intense enough to stop him in his tracks, but is still such that 
it is not free to nudge that middle part of the brain which mediates the body’s 
49
  “Cum anima non sit natura corporea, nec locali spatio corpus impleat, sicut aqua utrum 
sive spongiam; sed miris modis ipso incorporeo nutu commixta sit vivificando corpori, quo et 
imperat corpori, quadam intentione non mole: quanto magis, inquam, nutus ipse voluntatis 
eius non per locum movetur, ut corpus per locum moveat, quando totum per partes movet, nec 
aliquas loco movet nisi per illas quas loco non movet?” Augustine, Gn. litt., VIII.21.42.

POLIGrAFI
92
movements, he sometimes forgets both where he is coming from and where 
he is going, and without noticing it passes the homestead he was making for – 
having nothing wrong with the nature of his body, but his soul has been called 
away to some other matter.
50
The fact that the human soul has an intentio, namely that it can 
be both distracted from, as in this case, or intensely focused on and 
attentive to something which is not its body proves that the soul is 
something different from the body it controls and from the instruments 
it uses, namely air. As we know from Augustine’s analysis of sensation 
in his De musica, when perceiving something, the soul does not suffer 
anything. The object perceived or the very sense organs through which 
the object reaches the soul do not touch the soul in any way. rather, it 
is the soul that can direct its own intention towards them or away from 
them. But now we know that this means directing, or intending, air 
towards or away from them.
What Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram shows with the utter clarity, 
compared with the previous texts analysed, is not that intentio in Au-
gustine is a calque of the pneumatological concept of tonos developed 
by the ancient Stoics,
51
 but rather that intentio is in Augustine pre-
cisely and from the beginning the opposite of the material, aerial tonos, 
namely an anti-pneumatological concept that allows the split between 
aer and spiritus. It is right here with such a use of intentio that the flatum 
50
  “Namque aliud esse ipsam, aliud haec eius corporalia ministeria, vel vasa, vel organa, vel 
si quid aptius dici possunt, hinc evidenter elucet, quod plerumque se vehementi cogitatio-
nis intentione avertit ab omnibus, ut prae oculis patentibus recteque valentibus multa posita 
nesciat; et si maior intentio est, dum ambulabat, repente subsistat, avertens utique imperandi 
nutum a ministerio motionis qua pedes agebantur: si autem non tanta est cogitationis intentio, 
ut figat ambulantem loco, sed tamen tanta est ut partem illam cerebri mediam nuntiantem 
corporis motus non vacet advertere; obliviscitur aliquando et unde veniat, et quo eat, et transit 
imprudens villam quo tendebat, natura sui corporis sana, sed sua in aliud avocata.” Augustine, 
Gn. litt., VII.26. 
51
  No one has made such extreme claims, but this is the strawman some supporters of the 
Neo-Platonist Augustine, such as Stéphane T oulouse, have built on the suggestions of r ohmer, 
O’Daly and Solère, among others. r ohmer, “L ’intentionnalité,” 497; O’Daly, Augustine’s Philo-
sophy, 43–45; Solère, “T ension et intention,” 126–128; Stéphane T oulouse, “Influences néopla-
toniciennes sur l’analyse augustinienne des visiones,” Archives de Philosophie 72, no. 2 (2009): 
235–237.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
93
becomes spiritus, a term as ambiguous as the former and yet one Augus-
tine is ready to transform into what we still call “the spirit:”
What we are saying is that whatever the soul is, it is neither one of these 
four well-known elements, which are manifestly bodies, nor is it what God is. 
But you cannot state better what it is than by saying that it is the soul or spirit 
of life. The reason for adding “of life,” you see, is that this air [aer] too is often 
called spirit [spiritus].
52
Through the expression spiritus vitae, spirit of life, Augustine tries to 
delimit a space for the immaterial spirit that intentio has made possible. 
Augustine’s Neo-Platonist Account of the T rinity 
as a r ejection of the Materialist Theory of Mixture
What we discover in Augustine’s De Trinitate, perhaps one of Au-
gustine’s most important texts, is that intentio does not stop playing a 
role once we move from the soul to that purely immaterial spirit that 
he takes God to be. But rather it plays a role that is as foundational and 
one that Western culture has perfectly internalised. When we talk about 
intention nowadays, it is almost impossible to disentangle this concept 
from that of the will, with which it seems to coincide. As we will see, 
such a coincidence was thought for the first time by Augustine in his 
De Trinitate and it can be read as the conclusion of the process of de-
materialisation of the spirit that from intentio led to attentio and finally 
to voluntas (and love), and which this article has been tracing all along. 
The point for Augustine will be to show that the true life, of human 
beings and of everything, namely God, has absolutely nothing to do 
with the external, material world, even more than one could imagine by 
looking at the phenomenon of perception, as he had done in his earlier 
works: God, the Trinity, is the most interior, the most self-sustaining 
substance that exists, a transcendental subject that lives of and in itself. 
52
  “Nam et nos dicimus, quidquid anima est, non esse horum quatuor notissimorum ele-
mentorum, quae manifesta sunt corpora; sed neque hoc esse quod Deus est. Quid sit autem, 
non dicitur melius quam anima vel spiritus vitae. Ideo enim additur, vitae, quia et iste aer 
plerumque dicitur spiritus.” Augustine, Gn. litt., VII.30.

POLIGrAFI
94
The aim of the last seven books of Augustine’s De Trinitate is to 
clarify the mystery of the Trinity, namely how God could be a Trinity 
or, according to the well-known formula: three single persons in one 
substance. It will be impossible to understand Augustine’s arguments 
about the T rinity and their implications, unless we understand that this 
was for Augustine, and for the Church Fathers before him, first and 
foremost a metaphysical conundrum. The metaphysical question is: 
how is it possible that three entities can coexist in a single substance, 
namely how can they coincide with one another, and at the same time 
be each one a different “person?” As Wolfson has shown, the Church 
Fathers had interpreted this problem from the beginning in a similar 
fashion to the mystery of the incarnation and the related problem of the 
two natures of Christ, namely as a problem of “mixture.”
53
 Indeed, the 
Fathers had found in ancient philosophy a wide array of discussions on 
this theme, the same we have already partially discussed: first in Aristo-
tle, who had been the first to give a catalogue of different kinds of “uni-
ties;” and then in the Stoics, who on a very specific kind of mixture had 
founded their whole philosophy – not just their psychology, as we saw 
in the first part of this article, but their cosmology as well, as Alexander 
of Aphrodisia had already noticed.
54
 
As Pépin demonstrated in the conclusion to the article already cited, 
the case here is analogous to the already discussed one of the relation-
ship between soul and body.
55
 Indeed, as we saw in the first part of this 
article, while the Stoics understood it as a mixture, namely as a com-
plete interpenetration and distentio of two bodies, Augustine, following 
53
  “As to what is meant by these terms and also how the mystery of triunity is to be solved, 
Augustine’s discussion of the subject betrays the influence of Aristotle’s discussion of the various 
kinds of relative unity and of the use made of it by earlier Fathers in their dealing with the mys-
tery of triunity.” Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of The Church Fathers, vol. 1, Faith, T rinity, 
Incarnation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 350. Most recently, Alain de 
Libera has come back to this problem; Alain de Libera, Naissance du sujet (Paris: J. Vrin, 2016), 
257–269.
54
  “For their theory of blending does not rely on something else, but their views on the soul 
depend on it, and their notorious Fate and their universal Providence gain conviction in this 
way if indeed their [theory] of principles and God, as well as the unification and sympathy 
of everything depend on it; for the God that pervades matter is all of these things for them.” 
Alexander of Aphrodisias, Stoic Physics, 226.34–227; SVF, II.475. 
55
  Pépin, “Une nouvelle source,” 92–107.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
95
the Neo-Platonists and Porphyry in particular, read it as a relationship 
of intentio between the incorporeal soul and the corporeal body. But 
this time what is at stake is the possibility of an immaterial version 
of precisely what the Stoics had imagined and believed to be able to 
prove with empirical evidence: namely, that two bodies can penetrate 
each other completely (expressed with the noun ἀντιπαρέκτασις (anti-
parektasis) or the verb χωρέω (choreo) or περιχωρέω (perichoreo)) without 
each of them losing its own qualities, like water and wine when mixed. 
The Greek Fathers called this interpenetration of different immaterial 
substances in one immaterial essence very aptly perichoresis, one of the 
terms, as Wolfson noted, used by the Stoics to refer to the interpenetra-
tion that took place in what they called mixtures and which in Latin 
will be translated as circumincessio.
56
 And it is the possibility of this 
immaterial perichoresis that Augustine’s De T rinitate wants to make pos-
sible, once again through intentio, although in a metamorphised form. 
But proving that an interpenetration of immaterial substances is 
possible appeared to be much harder than proving that an interpenetra-
tion of bodies is, or perhaps just as hard if we remember that Augustine 
rejected the second theory, at least after his conversion. While the Stoics 
could turn to physical, empirical examples, to prove that bodies actu-
ally penetrated each other without losing their own nature, we seem to 
be at a loss in regard to immaterial substances. In Book VII, Augustine 
makes this confession: he goes over three well-known analogies that had 
already been used to understand the relationship between essence and 
persons inside the T rinity and shows that none of them works.
57
 Each of 
them leads to a different heresy. It is impossible, he claims, for humans 
to understand this specific mixture because everything we perceive and 
imagine is material and corporeal, it has dimensions, while God, the 
T rinity, has no dimensions. But then, Augustine’s innovation, which he 
56
  Wolfson, Philosophy of The Church Fathers, 418–433; August Deneffe, “Perichoresis, cir-
cumincessio, circuminsessio: Eine terminologische Untersuchung,” Zeitschrift für katholische 
Theologie 47, no. 4 (1923): 497–532; de Libera, Naissance du sujet, 283–295.
57
  The first one is that the essence would correspond to a genus and the persons to different 
species; the second that they would correspond respectively to a species and different individu-
als; and the third one that one could understand the essence as the common matter or sub-
stance from which the three persons are formed, like in the case of some gold from which three 
statues are formed. Augustine, Trin., VII.9–11.

POLIGrAFI
96
takes once again from the Neo-Platonists – Plotinus this time – is to 
claim that an empirical example exists but is detached from everything 
material. An analogy, or an image he will say, of the way the Trinity 
works can be found in the immaterial doings of the human mind itself. 
It is not then by any chance that this final stage of the process would 
immediately betray its own Neo-Platonist underpinnings and the fi-
nal, explicit conversion of intentio into a full-fledged and fully trace-
able Neo-Platonist concept: βούλησις (boulesis) or voluntas. As Ernst 
Benz once showed, Augustine’s trinitarian exploration can be read as a 
Christian reading of Plotinus’ Enneads VI.8, a version of which Augus-
tine could have read already in Marius Victorinus, the Neo-Platonist 
philosopher and then converted Christian, in whose translation Au-
gustine probably read the libri platonici leading to his conversion.
58
 In 
Enneads VI.8, Plotinus reached the speculative peak of his philosophy 
by trying to understand in which way the One, the supreme principle, 
worked. His answer was that the One is the Absolute Good and it is 
beyond being and life, and it is therefore indefinable through any cat-
egory or attribute of this world, like in every proper negative theology. 
Yet by using the analogy of the human mind through the particle οἷον 
(“as if,” which in Augustine becomes quasi),
59
 he discerned in the One 
three activities that are actually one: as the Absolute Good, the One 
contemplates, wills and loves itself as the absolute good, and these three 
activities are one; because as soon as it contemplates itself, it also knows 
itself as the Absolute Good and it also wants to be itself, and therefore 
it loves itself.
60
 For Plotinus, the One is a self-contemplating mind that, 
58
  Pépin argues that the model is not Plotinus but Porphyry. Yet Benz’s evidence is quite 
solid. Here it must be noticed that Benz’s work is almost completely absent from any Augustine 
bibliography. This has implied a general delay in understanding the role Augustine has played 
in the invention of the Western concept of voluntas. Ernst Benz, Marius Victorinus und die Ent-
wicklung der abendländischen Willensmetaphysik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1932), 289–309. 
Albrecht Dihle also confirms Benz’s argument. Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classi -
cal Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 123–129.
59
  See for example, Augustine, Trin., XI.11. On the οἷον, see Benz, Marius Victorinus, 289–293. 
60
  “Theoretical intellect, that is, primary Intellect is in this way up to itself, since its function 
is never up to something else. On the contrary, it reverted entirely towards itself and its func-
tion, lying itself in the Good with no deficiency and fulfilled, living in a way in conformity 
to will. Its will is intellection, but it is called ‘will’ because its [activity] accords with Intellect. 
So-called will imitates what is in accord with Intellect, for will wants the Good, while thinking 

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
97
therefore, wills and loves itself, with no need for an outside. This image 
of the human mind can be read, according to Augustine, as an image of 
the Divine T rinity: three persons in one essence. 
All these different argumentative steps are present, although at dif-
ferent moments and in a different order, in Augustine’s De Trinitate. 
If Plotinus had already undertaken the task of interpreting the One as 
an entirely interior life, self-sufficient and self-sustaining through its 
capacity for contemplation, will and self-love, similar to the human 
mind, Augustine’s innovation, central to our research, goes even deeper 
by grounding such a process more profoundly in the psychology of the 
human mind.
61
 Just as his psychology was founded on the rejection of 
the possibility that soul and body could be a mixture of two bodies, the 
soul as breath and the body itself, so his theology is based on the rejec-
tion of God as a material mixture and the proof that something like 
an immaterial mixture is possible. And the second argument depends 
in toto on the first one. For Augustine, the Trinity is a trinity of mens, 
amor and notitia, a mind that loves and knows itself, or more clearly a 
trinity of memory, intelligence and will, a mind that is certain to always 
be remembering, comprehending and willing at the same time, only 
because the mind is first of all a trinity of memory, things remembered 
and voluntas, which in turn is based on the even more material trinity 
of vision, object seen and intentio. It is through this innovation that the 
process of the dematerialisation of the spirit and of intentio finally takes 
place and intentio as voluntas can come to coincide with the totally im-
material Holy Spirit itself.
lies truly in the Good. Intellect, then, possesses what will wants, and, when will attains it, will 
becomes intellection.” Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. Loyd P . Gerson, trans. George Boys-Stones et 
al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), VI.8.6. “It is borne in a way inside itself, 
as though loving itself, in the pure radiance, being itself that which it loved, that is, it has made 
itself exist, if indeed it is persisting activity and the most loved thing, like Intellect. But Intellect 
is the result of actuality; hence, the Good is that, too, but not of anything else. It is, therefore, 
the result of its own activity. It is, therefore, not as it is accidentally; rather, it is as it itself acts.” 
Plotinus, Enneads, VI.8.16.
61
  This is the reason why Augustine’s De Trinitate has also been read as a psychological trea-
tise, which also explains why its concepts had such an influence on most psychological theoris-
ing in the European tradition. 

POLIGrAFI
98
The Dematerialisation of the Spirit: 
The Central r ole of Intentio as Attentio and Voluntas 
in Augustine’s Account of the T rinity 
T o read the second part of Augustine’s De T rinitate means to appreci-
ate for the first time the central role that Augustine’s theory of sensation 
played from the beginning in his conception of God: the way in which, 
from the beginning, his understanding of perception made possible not 
only the immateriality of the human soul, as we already saw, but also 
the immateriality of God Himself. And this immateriality, the negation 
of any corporeal mixture, depends on voluntas, a direct equivalent of 
intentio in the soul-body relationship – the two have become at this 
point synonymous, as we already saw in his De Genesi ad litteram. In-
deed, Augustine’s whole attempt to reach an image of the Divine T rin-
ity – just an image because God is completely unreachable – is based on 
the possibility of God’s similarity to the human being, which Augustine 
had found in Plotinus but that he read in Christian terms through the 
scriptural assumption of the imago dei: the human being was created in 
the image of God.
62
 This similarity allowed the possibility for a regressus 
to God in terms of trinity, according to which starting from the trinity 
that Augustine believed to be intrinsic to the homo exterior, the human 
being in his relation to the external world, one could reach a better 
understanding of the trinity of the homo interior, the spiritual mind of 
the human being, and therefore of the Divine T rinity itself. It is in this 
way that intentio came to play a role, and a central one at that, in the 
nature of God Himself.
Therefore, in Book XI of his De T rinitate, we find out, as part of this 
process, that the theory of sensation we read in Augustine contained 
from the beginning some form of trinity.
63
 When we perceive some-
62
  At other times, Augustine claims that the whole of nature must be similar in some way to 
God since He created it. Augustine, Trin., XI.8.
63
  On the passages on the homo exterior in the De Trinitate see Carla Di Martino, “Il ruolo 
della intentio nell’evoluzione della psicologia di Agostino: dal De libero arbitrio al De Trinita-
te,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 46, no. 2 (2000): 188–196, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.
rEA.5.104821 .

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
99
thing there are always three elements:
64
 1) the object one sees; 2) the 
visio, namely what one actually sees in one’s mind once the sense organs 
have been informed by the object outside; and 3) most importantly, the 
intentio animi, “quod in ea re quae videtur quamdiu videtur sensum 
detinet oculorum,” namely what keeps the sense organs fixed on the 
object seen.
65
 This is the first, most sensible, most corporeal trinity that 
one can find in the homo exterior and yet one that, as we already know, 
is not completely corporeal. Augustine specifies more than once that 
this trinity has an interesting characteristic, typical of the homo exterior, 
namely the three elements are not part of the same substance, they are 
not of the same nature. Indeed, the object seen and the sense organ 
belong to two different bodies, unless we are perceiving our own body. 
But, most importantly, as we know, the intentio animi, unlike the other 
two elements, is not corporeal in any way, but rather belongs to the ani-
mus and only to the animus. And it is this intentio, which already in this 
discussion is called, at times, voluntas,
66
 that remains a constant of all 
the trinities Augustine will analyse and that hides a power which cannot 
be underestimated: the vis copulandi, the ability to bring together and 
unify different things, indeed to mix them, which if powerful enough, 
it becomes or can be called “amor aut cupiditas aut libido” (love or cu-
pidity or lust).
67
 In other words, the first trinity already shows, although 
as a possible negative capability as well, the further possibilities of inten-
tio: intentio is voluntas, and therefore love, or bad love.
The second trinity that Augustine finds in the homo exterior is the 
trinity of cogitatio (thought) or memory. Once the intentio animi that 
had brought together the object seen and the organ of sense is directed 
somewhere else, the image produced does not disappear completely but 
64
  The sense in question does not matter, but Augustine takes the example of vision, as he had 
done in his De Genesi ad litteram.
65
  Augustine, Trin., XI.3–5. 
66
  “Since this is so, let us recall how these three, though differing in nature, may be mixed 
together [contemperentur] into a kind of unity, namely, (i) the form of the body that is seen, 
(ii) its image impressed on the sense, which is vision, or the sense informed, and (iii) the will 
of the soul [voluntas animi] which directs the sense to the sensible thing and keeps the vision 
itself fixed upon it. […] The third, however, is proper to the soul alone, because it is the will.” 
Augustine, Trin., XI.5.
67
  Augustine, Trin., XI.5.

POLIGrAFI
100
gives rise to a similar image in our memory. The presence of this image 
in our memory makes possible the second trinity, the trinity of cogita-
tio: when we think of something, what happens is that 3) our will – in-
tentio has now officially become voluntas, but at other times it will still 
be referred to as voluntatis intentio
68
 – directs itself towards the 1) image 
in our memory, giving rise to a new form of 2) interior vision, what we 
call cogitatio, thought, because the three are brought together (coguntur) 
by the force of the will (coactus).
69
 
There is, however, a fundamental difference between the first and 
the second trinity of the homo exterior, according to Augustine: in the 
latter case, the three are of the same substance. They all belong this time 
to the animus.
70
 Sensible bodies have been left behind. And yet it is still 
of their traces that we are thinking, meaning that the will can still turn 
towards the corporeal world and be lost in it. This trinity is much closer 
to that of God because it takes place completely inside an immaterial 
substance, and yet it still preserves some form of relationship to the 
outside world, which has a further implication: like in the case of the 
trinity of perception, in this case too there can be countless trinities; 
every time we perceive or think of something, a new trinity is taking 
place, which is another way to say that our will can change.
71
 But this 
is not the case for God.
Therefore, Augustine claims, the image of the Divine Trinity in the 
human being cannot be found in the homo exterior, still completely 
similar in its workings to animals and beasts, but in the homo interior, 
in the human being as mind. What has hardly been noticed is that 
what remains constant in this shift from exterior to interior, from beast 
to human, is intentio.
72
 The difference between beast and man is that, 
while both have intentio, the animal does not seem to be able to direct 
it wherever it wishes. Unlike animals, the human mind has the ability 
to direct one’s own intention away from the external world or anything 
68
  Augustine, Trin., XI.7.
69
  Augustine, Trin., XI.6.
70
  Augustine, Trin., XI.6–7.
71
  Augustine, Trin., XI.7.12–8.13.
72
  On the transformation of intentio into voluntas in this case, see Di Martino, “Il ruolo della 
intentio,”196–197.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
101
that has to do with the external world, towards itself, and therefore to-
wards the unchangeable truths the mind contains.
73
 And it is precisely 
this process that Augustine describes in order to reach that trinity of the 
mind that he believes to present, although only partially, the clearest 
picture of the Divine T rinity. 
It is here that Augustine finds something very similar to Plotinus: 
when the mind turns towards itself in search of itself in order to un-
derstand the way it works, it means that the mind already wills or loves 
itself, which according to Augustine are the same thing. But if the mind 
wills or loves itself, it means that it must in some way already know 
itself, otherwise it would not be able to turn towards itself and will and 
love itself.
74
 Whenever we look at the mind intending itself, if such a 
term is at this point allowed, we find a trinity according to Augustine: 
the trinity of mens, amor and notitia (mind, love and knowledge). And 
what is so peculiar about this trinity, in comparison to the ones of the 
homo exterior, is that in this case the three elements are three different 
elements while really just being one single substance, since each one is 
inside the other two:
And so each exists in itself. But they are mutually in each other in such a 
way that the mind that loves is in the love, and love is in the knowledge of 
him who loves, and knowledge is in the mind that knows. And so each one 
is in each two, because the mind that knows and loves itself is in its own love 
and knowledge; and the love of the mind that knows and loves itself is in the 
mind and in its knowledge; and the knowledge of the mind that knows and 
loves itself is in the mind and in its love; because it loves itself as knowing 
and knows itself as loving. And for this reason, each two are also in each one, 
because the mind that knows and loves itself is in the love with its knowledge 
in the knowledge with its love, since the love itself and the knowledge are also 
together in the mind that loves and knows itself. But we have shown above, 
how all are in all, since the mind loves itself as a whole, and knows itself as a 
whole, and knows all its love, and loves all its knowledge, when these three 
are perfect in respect to themselves. These three, therefore, are in a marvelous 
manner inseparable from one another; and yet each of them is a substance, 
73
  Augustine, Trin., XII.2.
74
  Augustine, Trin., IX.2.3–3.8.

POLIGrAFI
102
and all together are one substance or essence, while the terms themselves ex-
press a mutual relationship.
75
It is not surprising that Augustine tries to show once again that this 
trinity has nothing to do with the material mixtures one can appreci-
ate in nature. right before the previous passage in Book IX, he uses 
examples taken directly from the debate on mixture, which he prob-
ably found in Porphyry. One could, Augustine wonders, consider this 
trinity of mens, amor and notitia as three parts of a single substance. It 
would be like a beverage made of water, wine and honey, in which each 
ingredient pervades the whole mixture and yet there are three different 
substances. This is the classic Stoic example, with the addition of a third 
ingredient to have a trinity. But this example does not work, according 
to Augustine. The difference is that while wine, water and honey create 
a single new substance but are not that single substance any longer, in 
the case of the trinity of the mind, and therefore of the Divine Trinity 
too, these three substances stay three different substances while shar-
ing one single essence, namely while becoming one single thing. What 
Augustine is doing here, following the Neo-Platonist precedent, is to 
deny the possibility of what the Stoics called mixture on a material level 
to make it possible on the immaterial one. This is the reason why Au-
gustine can explicitly claim: that there is here no mixture whatsoever, 
in the Stoic sense. 
But in these three, when the mind knows itself and loves itself, a trinity 
remains: the mind, its love, and its knowledge; and there is no confusion 
through any commingling [nulla commixtione confunditur], although each is a 
75
  “Ita sunt haec singula in se ipsis. In alternis autem ita sunt, quia et mens amans in amore 
est, et amor in amantis notitia, et notitia in mente noscente. Singula in binis ita sunt, quia 
mens quae se novit et amat, in amore et notitia sua est; et amor amantis mentis seseque scientis, 
in mente notitiaque eius est; et notitia mentis se scientis et amantis in mente atque in amore 
eius est, quia scientem se amat, et amantem se novit. Ac per hoc et bina in singulis, quia mens 
quae se novit et amat, cum sua notitia est in amore, et cum suo amore in notitia; amorque ipse 
et notitia simul sunt in mente, quae se amat et novit. Tota vero in totis quemadmodum sint, 
iam supra ostendimus cum se totam mens amat, et totam novit, et totum amorem suum novit, 
totamque amat notitiam suam, quando tria ista ad se ipsa perfecta sunt. Miro itaque modo tria 
ista inseparabilia sunt a semetipsis, et tamen eorum singulum quidque substantia est, et simul 
omnia una substantia vel essentia, cum et relative dicantur ad invicem.” Augustine, Trin., IX.8.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
103
substance in itself, and all are found mutually in all, whether each one in each 
two, or each two in each one. Consequently, all are in all.
76
In the trinity of mens, amor and notitia, Augustine has found the 
trace of an immaterial unio inconfusa.
It is now worth remembering that in his De quantitate animae, Au-
gustine had turned to linguistic theory in order to prove the immaterial 
relationship that the soul entertained with the body, claiming that the 
soul is in the body like the immaterial meaning is in the materially dis-
tended signifier. He does the same in his De T rinitate, merging his Neo-
Platonist reaction to the Stoic theory of mixture and his own Christian 
understanding of the Son as Logos or Verbum of the Father. The pos-
sibility of an immaterial mixture such as the trinity of mens, amor no-
titia, which corresponds directly to the Divine Trinity, where the mens 
is God, the notitia the Son and amor the Holy Spirit, finds thus further 
confirmation in Augustine’s conception of the verbum mentis. Accord-
ing to Augustine, when one turns his mind towards itself and begins 
that process of self-knowledge and self-love that leads to God, this pro-
cess always takes place “in language”:
The true knowledge of things, thence conceived, we bear with us as a word 
[verbum], and beget by speaking from within; nor does it depart from us by 
being born. But in conversing with others we add the service of our voice 
[ministerium vocis] or of some bodily sign to the word that remains within, 
in order to produce in the mind of the listener, by a kind of sensible remem-
brance, something similar to that which does not depart from the mind of the 
speaker. Thus there is nothing that we do through the members of our body, 
in our words and actions, by which the conduct of men is approved or disap-
proved, that is not preceded by the word that has been brought forth within 
us. For no one willingly [volens] does anything which he has not spoken previ-
ously in his heart.
77 
76
  “At in illis tribus, cum se novit mens et amat se, manet trinitas: mens, amor, notitia; et 
nulla commixtione confunditur, quamvis et singula sint in se ipsis, et invicem tota in totis, sive 
singula in binis, sive bina in singulis. Itaque omnia in omnibus.” Augustine, Trin., IX.8. 
77
  “Atque inde conceptam rerum veracem notitiam, tamquam verbum apud nos habemus, et 
dicendo intus gignimus; nec a nobis nascendo discedit. Cum autem ad alios loquimur, verbo 
intus manenti ministerium vocis adhibemus, aut alicuius signi corporalis, ut per quandam 
commemorationem sensibilem tale aliquid fiat etiam in animo audientis, quale de loquentis 
animo non recedit. Nihil itaque agimus per membra corporis in factis dictisque nostris, quibus 

POLIGrAFI
104
The result is that a silent word is generated within the mind. And 
this word is very different from the words one can express through one’s 
voice, gestures, or other corporeal signs, because this word never leaves 
one’s mind and precedes all those possible corporeal expressions.
78
 Ac-
tually, it is this word that makes those material words possible and in 
turn what makes this interior, immaterial word of knowledge possible is 
the love or rather the will with which is generated: “Love [amor], there-
fore, as a means, joins our word with the mind from which it is born; 
and as a third it binds itself with them in an incorporeal embrace, with-
out any confusion [sine ulla confusion]. […] The word that has been 
conceived and born is one and the same when the will [voluntas] rests in 
the knowledge of itself; this happens in the love of spiritual things.”
79
 It 
can be a will directed towards the external world or towards God, it can 
be cupiditas or caritas. But in any case, it is this will or love that binds 
together mind and word, that allows the mind to generate that interior 
word, and this is how God the Father generates the Son, his Word, in 
and through his own Spirit: 
So in some such way we also see the Trinity that is God, because there by 
our understanding we also behold Him, as it were, speaking, and His Word, 
that is, the Father and the Son, and the Love preceding from them and com-
mon to both, namely, the Holy Spirit?
80
 
vel approbantur vel improbantur mores hominum, quod non verbo apud nos intus edito pra-
evenimus. Nemo enim aliquid volens facit, quod non in corde suo prius dixerit.” Augustine, 
Trin., IX.12.
78
  On the relationship between voice and word in Augustine see also John T. Hamilton, 
Philology of the Flesh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 69–71.
79
  “Verbum ergo nostrum et mentem de qua gignitur, quasi medius amor coniungit, seque 
cum eis tertium complexu incorporeo, sine ulla confusione constringit. […] Conceptum au-
tem verbum et natum idipsum est, cum voluntas in ipsa notitia conquiescit, quod fit in amore 
spiritalium.” Augustine, Trin., IX.12–13.
80
  “Ita videmus etiam trinitatem deum quia et illic intellegendo conspicimus tamquam di-
centem et verbum eius, id est patrem et filium, atque inde procedentem caritatem utrique 
communem, sanctum scilicet spiritum?” Augustine, Trin., XV.6.10. On the linguistic side of 
Augustine’s trinitarian arguments and the role of intentio/voluntas in it, see Giorgio Santi’s piv-
otal contribution. Giorgio Santi, “Interiorità e verbum mentis,” in Interiorità e intenzionalità in 
S. Agostino: Atti del I° e II° Seminario Internazionale del Centro di Studi Agostiniani di Perugia, 
ed. Luigi Alici (r oma: Institutum Patristicum “Augustinianum,” 1990), 133–143.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
105
With Augustine’s De T rinitate, we enter a new realm altogether: the 
realm of the spirit. Everything that has to do with the senses, with the 
material and external world has lost here most of its meaning and be-
come just the very first step of a possible return of the human being to 
God. However, what we discover in Augustine’s De T rinitate is also how 
profoundly his conception of intentio penetrated his own philosophy as 
well as his most important theological notions, thanks to a new meta-
morphosis. Through a new, fascinating innovation, which we already 
partially observed in his De Genesi ad litteram, intentio shifts here from 
attentio to, first, voluntas and then love. But what is as important for 
us is that by studying this shift, we understand for the first time how 
intentio could come to be coupled, in the rest of the history of Western 
philosophy and culture, with the notion of will. By becoming voluntas 
and amor, intentio brings to an end the process of dematerialisation of 
the spirit, which had begun in Augustine’s early works: the soul and the 
spirit have nothing to do with air any longer. The T rinity, whose image 
Augustine finds in the mind of the human being, is a completely im-
material and spiritual substance thanks to its will and love. In loving 
itself, or in other words in willing itself, God or the mind is completely 
present to itself, without necessity for an outside. In linguistic terms, 
God is his own interior word, the Son, generated by an act of will in his 
own immaterial voice, the Holy Spirit. 
The Intention of the Spirit: T races of Intentio 
as Tonos in Augustine’s and Earlier Texts
What we have done in this article is to show that Verbeke was right: 
Augustine was the one to bring to conclusion the process of the dema-
terialisation of the spirit. But what he had not noticed is that the way 
Augustine was able to reach that conclusion was through the concept of 
intentio. In his works, intentio is always an anti-pneumatological con-
cept, which coupled with other concepts such as attentio and voluntas 
(or even amor) creates the possibility for an immaterial realm that Au-
gustine called the Spirit.
And yet, intentio in Augustine remains for many reasons a mystery. 
The stunning amount of secondary literature on the topic too does 

POLIGrAFI
106
not seem to be able to reach an agreement on the origin and meaning 
of such a powerful concept, which penetrates Augustine’s works from 
beginning to end. The dilemma arises from the fact that intentio seems 
to be a fully Neo-Platonist concept: as it was shown, most of the argu-
ments in which intentio makes an appearance can be easily traced back 
to a Neo-Platonist line of argumentation. And yet, there does not seem 
to be in the Neo-Platonist texts that have been handed down anything 
like intentio, neither in Ancient Greek nor in Latin.
81
 In the last seventy 
years, since the debate on intentio has begun, numerous correspond-
ing terms have been proposed – ῥοπή (rhopé; “inclination”), ἐπιστρέφειν 
(epistrephein; “turning”), προσέχειν (prosechein; “turning one’s attention 
to”), προσοχή (prosoché; “attention”), but also τάσις (tasis, “stretching”) 
and ἐπίτασις (epitasis; “stretching”) – but none of them seems to be 
able to explain completely what intentio is doing here.
82
 In all the cases 
proposed, the Neo-Platonist influence on Augustine’s use of intentio is 
clearly distinguishable and still something escapes it.
Perhaps the most fascinating theory regarding the origin of intentio 
in Augustine is the one introduced for the first time by Jean r ohmer 
in the 1950s and popularised in the 1980s by the influential work of 
Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind.
83
 According to these 
critics, intentio would be in Augustine the Latin translation of the Stoic, 
materialist concept of τόνος (tonos, namely tension or tone), on which 
the Stoics based their whole philosophy.
84
 Indeed if the Stoics believed 
that the soul as breath (pneuma or spiritus) was in the body as physically 
distended and mixed to it, they also believed in an opposite movement, 
which they deemed characteristic of the spirit in general, namely its 
81
  “Although the local presence of soul to body is variously expressed by Plotinus and Porphy-
ry, there is no term among those most commonly used in their writings that can be compared 
with Augustine’s use of intentio here.” O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy, 44. 
82
  ῥοπή was proposed by Pépin and προσοχή is the recent suggestion of Stéphane Toulouse. 
Pépin, “Une nouvelle source,” 89; Toulouse, “Influences néoplatoniciennes,” 239.
83
  r ohmer, “L ’intentionnalité,” 497; O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy, 43–45.
84
  Even though this is well known in the secondary literature, the role of the tonos in Stoic 
philosophy has been mostly underplayed, not unlike their materialist pneumatology. This situ-
ation is due to an overall favouring of a mere ethical reading of this philosophical school, which 
has lasted almost two millennia. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to explore this further in this 
essay.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
107
tonos. According to the Ancient Stoics, it was this tonos, this internal 
tension of the air, that gave life to everything in the cosmos: the spirit, 
of which the soul is only a specific kind, was not just distended in bod-
ies but also intended, keeping them together and even allowing move-
ment, life.
85
 
However, such a lineage theory was and is easily disproved. Using as 
evidence for the most part a single correspondence between tonos and 
intentio in the Stoic and in Augustine’s theory of vision, which we also 
studied in the context of his De Genesi ad litteram and his De T rinitate, 
the theory in question underestimates the complexity and equivocity 
of the term intentio, as well as the clear differences that exist between 
Augustine’s theory of vision and the Stoic one.
86
 Indeed, as this paper 
has also shown, Augustine’s use of intentio, in his theory of vision, sen-
sation or otherwise, is eminently and undeniably Neo-Platonist. And 
yet, it is also profoundly related to the pneumatological theory of tonos 
to which these critics have surreptitiously alerted us, and in ways that 
deserve an explanation. 
The fact that intentio in Augustine is always an anti-pneumatological 
concept used by him to deny any form of corporeal distention and 
mixture, so as to make it possible on the immaterial level, suggests that 
Augustine is explicitly responding to the theory of the tonos. We could 
even go as far as to claim that he is explicitly rejecting something like 
a materialist theory of intentio. Once one reads intentio in Augustine 
in the (anti-)pneumatological context we have delimited, it is hard not 
to think that there could be behind intentio another meaning, perhaps 
a meaning that Augustine himself used to employ and embrace before 
he even became Augustinus. Perhaps the most surprising fact about this 
hypothesis is that Augustine himself tells us so in a fascinating appear-
ance of intentio, in another explicitly pneumatological context, which 
has unfortunately received no particular attention. At the beginning of 
Book VII of his Confessions, Augustine describes his beliefs regarding 
God and the soul before his conversion, first to Neo-Platonism and 
85
  SVF, II.439–462. David E. Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (Columbus: Ohio State 
University Press, 1977), 136–184.
86
  The latter is Toulouse’s main complaint against such a theory. Toulouse, “Influences néo -
platoniciennes,” 233.

POLIGrAFI
108
then to Christianity, before he became the only Augustine we know. At 
the time, he confesses to God, he was completely unable to imagine a 
substance which he could not perceive by his own eyes. And therefore, 
he was not able to imagine a God that was not material. But it is worth 
lingering on Augustine’s choice of words:
Hardly had they been dispersed when in the flash of an eye they had re-
grouped and were back again. They attacked my power of vision and clouded 
it. Although you were not in the shape of the human body, I nevertheless felt 
forced to imagine something corporeal [corporeum] occupying space [per spa-
tia locorum] either infused [infusus] in the world or diffused [diffusus] outside 
the world through infinite spaces.
87
Augustine was able to understand that God was not like a human 
being, what pagans used to believe, and yet could imagine Him only in 
corporeal terms either infusum in the world or diffusum through every 
space, two terms that we have shown to be used as synonyms for inten-
tus and distentus and to derive from the Stoic theory of mixture and the 
materialist cosmology related to it. 
Indeed, such a link to pneumatology is confirmed right after. T rying 
to further specify the image of God he entertained before his conver-
sion, Augustine claims:
I conceived even you, life of my life, as a large being, permeating infinite 
space on every side, penetrating the entire mass of the world, and outside this 
extending in all directions for immense distances without end; […] thus I 
thought that you permeate not only the body of heaven and air and sea but 
even earth, and that in everything, both the greatest and the smallest things, 
this physical frame is open to receive your presence, so that by a secret breath 
of life [occulta inspiratione] you govern all things which you created, both in-
wardly and outwardly [intrinsecus et extrinsecus].
88
87
  “Et vix dimota in ictu oculi ecce conglobata rursus aderat et irruebat in aspectum meum et 
obnubilabat eum, ut quamvis non forma humani corporis, corporeum tamen aliquid cogitare 
cogerer per spatia locorum sive infusum mundo sive etiam extra mundum per infinita diffu-
sum.” Augustine, Conf., VII.1.
88
  “Ita etiam te, vita vitae meae, grandem per infinita spatia undique cogitabam penetrare 
totam mundi molem et extra eam quaquaversum per immensa sine termino […]. sic tibi puta-
bam non solum caeli et aeris et maris sed etiam terrae corpus pervium et ex omnibus maximis 
minimisque partibus penetrabile ad capiendam praesentiam tuam, occulta inspiratione intrin-
secus et extrinsecus administrantem omnia, quae creasti.” Augustine, Conf., VII.1.2.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
109
God is here a material God that, through some form of mixture, 
penetrates and pervades matter and, through some “occulta inspira-
tione,” namely as a corporeal breath, manages and controls everything 
through a double movement, towards the inside and towards the out-
side (intrinsecus et extrinsecus). The latter is the expression Augustine 
used in a passage from the De quantitate animae to describe the materi-
alist theory he was rejecting.
89
 As some critics have argued, such a con-
ception of God seems to reflect more a Stoic monistic understanding of 
God, than the dualistic account proper of Manicheism, which we know 
from other works by Augustine.
90
 But even if we doubt that this passage 
could count as evidence for a possible straightforwardly Stoic period in 
Augustine’s life, it is impossible to deny that the supposedly Manichean 
ideas depicted here are imbued with Stoic concepts to which Augustine 
had been exposed in some way.
But what matters the most for us is that in between these passages, 
Augustine does not only confess to his pre-conversion, Stoic-imbued 
materialism, but he himself gives a reason for it: surprisingly, intentio. 
So my heart had become gross, and I had no clear vision even of my own 
self. I thought simply non-existent anything not extended in space or diffused 
or concentrated or expanding [per aliquanta spatia tenderetur vel diffunderetur 
vel conglobaretur vel tumeret], and which does not possess, or is incapable of 
possessing, such qualities. Indeed, my eyes were accustomed to these kinds of 
forms and those kinds of images my heart used to inhabit; and I did not see 
that the intention [intentionem] by which I formed these images was not such 
a thing, though it could not form them unless it were some great thing.
91
89
  “A. Now, you do not think your soul exists anywhere except in your body, do you? / E. No, 
I don’t. / A. Is the soul inside [intrinsecus] the body only, like the contents of a waterskin, so 
to say, or only on the outside, like a covering, or do you think it is both inside and outside [et 
intrinsecus et extrinsecus]?” Augustine, Qu. an., 7. The same exact expression can also be found 
in Philo, to describe the double pneumatic force of the soul, a central tenet of Stoic psychology. 
SVF, II.802.
90
  Augustine, Le confessioni, ed. Maria Bettetini (T orino: Einaudi, 2000), 675. The point was 
made quite powerfully by Charles Baguette. However, J. J. O’Donnell rejected Baguette’s the-
ory, but his arguments do not seem strong enough. Charles Baguette, “Une période stoïcienne 
dans l’évolution de la pensée de saint Augustin,” Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques 16, 
no. 1–2 (1970): 47–77; Augustine, Confessions, ed. J. J. O’Donnell, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon 
Press, 1992), 392.
91
  “Ego itaque incrassatus corde nec mihimet ipsi vel ipse conspicuus, quidquid non per ali-
quanta spatia tenderetur vel diffunderetur vel conglobaretur vel tumeret vel tale aliquid caperet 

POLIGrAFI
110
The reason why he understood God materially, he tells us, is because 
he understood his own soul materially, which means as something that 
is stretched (tenderetur) or distended and diffused (diffunderetur). But 
most importantly, he understood his own soul materially because he 
was not able to differentiate his own intentio from the very things he 
perceived, which is to say that he understood his own intentio as a mate-
rial movement. 
What this passage reveals to us is that Augustine’s anti-pneumato-
logical conception of intentio, as he developed it against the materialist 
theories of the Stoics, following the Neo-Platonists, came to replace and 
erase a previous theory of intentio that has gone almost completely lost. 
According to this theory, the soul as material breath had both a mate-
rial distentio and a material intentio, it was both corporeally distended 
in the body but also corporeally intended, and it was this material in-
tentio that made sensation and movement possible. And the same was 
true for God. Indeed, what the scholars who supported the hypothesis 
of the kinship between the Ancient Greek tonos and the Latin intentio 
in Augustine never noticed is that there are Latin precedents for such a 
translation. To give just one example, Seneca describes God thus in his 
Ad Helviam:
Believe me, this was the action of the great creator of the universe, whoever 
he may be, whether an all-powerful God, or incorporeal r eason contriving 
vast works, or divine Spirit [divinus spiritus] diffused in all things from the 
smallest to the greatest with uniform intention [aequali intentione diffusus], or 
Fate and an unalterable sequence of causes clinging one to the other.
92
Among the various conceptions of God that a late Stoic such as Sen-
eca can contemplate, there is still the pneumatological one he inherited, 
aut capere posset, nihil prorsus esse arbitrabar. Per quales enim formas ire solent oculi mei, per 
tales imagines ibat cor meum, nec videbam hanc eamdem intentionem, qua illas ipsas imagines 
formabam, non esse tale aliquid; quae tamen ipsas non formaret, nisi esset magnum aliquid.” 
Augustine, Conf., VII.1.2.
92
  “Id actum est, mihi crede, ab illo, quisquis formator universi fuit, sive ille deus est po-
tens omnium, sive incorporalis ratio ingentium operum artifex, sive divinus spiritus per omnia 
maxima ac minima aequali intentione diffusus, sive fatum et immutabilis causarum inter se 
cohaerentium series.” Seneca, “De Consolatione ad Helviam,” in Moral Essays, trans. John W. 
Basore, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), 8.3.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
111
according to which God is a breath that is diffused in everything with 
equal intention. 
And even if Augustine is said to have never explicitly cited Seneca 
in his oeuvre, one begins to doubt that he did not know the Senecan 
expression just cited, when he wrote, in another letter from the later 
years:
93
If I have been successful in treating of these matters, in proportion to my 
strength and by the Lord’s help, when you set yourself [te extendis] to think 
of God everywhere present and everywhere wholly present, not distributed in 
different places as if by the stretching of physical mass [distentione diffusum], 
turn your mind from all corporeal images such as it is wont to fashion. That is 
not how we think of wisdom or justice or, finally, of love, of which it is writ-
ten: “God is Love.”
94
This is another of the many Augustinian texts that reject the concep-
tion of God (and soul) as a distended, material breath. But we see here 
how the Senecan formula “intentione diffusus” has become “distentione 
diffusum,” because intentio has been moved to the immaterial level, ex-
pressed here by the verb extendere, which one can find often coupled 
with intentio in other passages.
95
93
  This is Hagendahl’s conclusion in his famous, still authoritative study. Harald Hagen-
dahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, vol. 2 (Gothenburg: Elander, 1967), 569–584. However, 
there is new material to take into consideration. See Ilona Opelt, “Seneca bei Augustinus,” 
in Congresso Internazionale su s. Agostino nel XVI Centenario della Conversione, Atti I (r ome: 
StudEphAug, 1987), 363–70.
94
  “Haec si pro viribus nostris, quantum Dominus adiuvit, rite tractavimus; quando Deum 
ubique praesentem, et non spatiis distantibus, quasi aliqua mole vel distentione diffusum, sed 
ubique totum cogitare te extendis, averte mentem ab omnibus imaginibus corporum, quas hu-
mana cogitatio volvere consuevit. Non enim sic sapientia, non iustitia, non sic denique caritas 
cogitatur, de qua scriptum est: Deus caritas est.” Augustine, Ep., 187.41.
95
  The most famous one from Confessions, Book XI: “‘Because your mercy is more than lives’ 
(Ps. 62: 4), see how my life is a distention in several directions [ecce distentio est vita mea]. ‘Your 
right hand upheld me’ (Ps. 17: 36; 62: 9) in my Lord, the Son of man who is mediator between 
you the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things; so ‘I 
might apprehend him in whom also I am apprehended’ (Phil. 3: 12–14), and leaving behind 
the old days I might be gathered to follow the One, ‘forgetting the past’ and moving not 
towards those future things which are transitory but to ‘the things which are before’ me, not 
stretched out in distraction [non distentus] but extended in reach [sed extentus], not according to 
distention but according to intention [non secundum distentionem, sed secundum intentionem]. 
So I ‘pursue the prize of the high calling’ where I ‘may hear the voice of praise’ and ‘contemplate 
your delight’ (Ps. 25: 7; 26: 4) which neither comes nor goes.” Augustine, Conf., XI.29.39. On 

POLIGrAFI
112
Considering the almost complete disappearance of such a materialist mean-
ing of intentio in the centuries that follow until our very day, we can only make 
hypotheses about how well-known such a materialist understanding of intentio 
was before Augustine. However, there are traces that show that it could have 
been as popular and pervasive as the pneumatological theories Augustine’s phi-
losophy came to replace. Perhaps the most fascinating example of such an ob-
scure situation can be found in a letter exchange between Marius Victorinus 
and Arianus Candidus written around 360 CE, to which a young Pierre Hadot 
dedicated his first academic article.
96
 This letter preserves some of the very few 
existing traces of a particular form of heresy that developed in the 4th
 
century 
CE among some followers of the Monarchian Sabellus, such as Photinus and 
Marcellus of Ancyra. These thinkers spoke of the Trinity in terms of typus, a 
medical term that indicated the rhythmic movement of expansion and contrac-
tion. In the words of Arianus Candidus, who describes such a heresy:
Some say that generation from God is close to what is called typum. In fact, 
God is Spirit. And furthermore, the Spirit sometimes intends [intendit] its 
own nature and at other times it resides in itself. This kind of movement they 
call typum. What does that imply, then? Out of this kind of movement sud-
denly emerges a certain being-son [filietas] and this is generation from God.
97
As Hadot has shown, this Monarchian heretical movement under-
stood the Trinity itself in Stoic terms. For them, God was spiritus, but 
this time in the sense of a vivifying breath. And what they believed to 
be characteristic of air is that air intends itself. Like Augustine, they 
argued that it is through intention that the generation of the Son in 
the Father takes place. But this intentio stood for the material tension 
the relationship between intendere, attendere, and extendere in Augustine, see Gerard O’Daly, 
“Time as Distentio and St. Augustine’s Exegesis of Philippians 3, 12-14,” Revue d’Études Augus-
tiniennes et Patristiques 23, no. 3–4 (1977): 265–271.
96
  Pierre Hadot, “Typus: Stoïcisme et Monarchianisme au IVe siècle d’après Candide l’Arien 
et Marius Victorinus,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 18 (1951): 177–187.
97
  My translation. “Dicunt quidam generationem esse a deo iuxta nominatum typum. Deus 
enim Spiritus est. Spiritus autem naturam suam nunc intendit, nunc in semet ipsum residit. 
Istius modi motum typum nominant. Quid deinde vero? Ab istius modi motione repente eru-
mpit filietas quaedam et haec est generatio a deo.” Cited in Hadot, “Typus,” 178. See also 
D. H. Williams, “Monarchianism and Photinus of Sirmium as the Persistent Heretical Face 
of the Fourth Century,” Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 2 (2006): 201–204, https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0017816006001209.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
113
of the material pneuma, the materially sonorous voice of God. Augus-
tine’s philosophy came to replace and erase this theory, as well as most 
materialist precursors. Before Augustine, intention had intrinsically to 
do with breath.  
Conclusion
This paper has sought to broaden our understanding of the concept 
of intention in the philosophical discourse, by proposing a new read-
ing of what are considered its origins in the works of Augustine. While 
traditionally, intention has been examined in isolation from pneuma-
tological considerations, this study contends that a pneumatological 
framework is crucial to comprehending Augustine’s development of in-
tentio. By delving into the pneumatological context in which Augustine 
and the Stoics operated, and by reevaluating the overlooked origins of 
intentio in the Stoic concept of tonos, I have illuminated the pivotal role 
played by air and breath in the history of intentionality.
Furthermore, this investigation has revealed that intentio serves as a 
linchpin in Augustine’s overarching argument for the immateriality of 
God and the soul, a thesis that characterises everything he wrote after 
his conversion first to Neo-Platonism and then to Christianity, which 
in turn means everything available to us. Through a meticulous analy-
sis of intentio’s evolution in his works from attentio to voluntas, I have 
demonstrated that this concept served as the fulcrum for the historical 
process Verbeke called the “spiritualisation of the spirit.” If as Verbeke 
had argued, it is with Augustine that the dematerialisation of the spirit 
and its separation from anything related to air finally reached its con-
clusion, this was only possible thanks to the new meaning he attributed 
to intentio. This move consisted in an epochal conceptual shift, which 
inaugurated the forgetfulness of any pre-Augustinian Stoic materialist 
accounts of intentio.
In conclusion, I have therefore claimed that Augustine’s intentio 
should not be seen as a mere continuation of the Stoic tonos, as some 
scholars have argued, but rather as an appropriation of it for Augus-
tine’s own spiritualist purposes. And yet, at the same time, Augustine’s 
intentio unveils for us this very layer of materialist, pneumatological in-

POLIGrAFI
114
tentionality, a dimension that is at work underneath his spiritualist con-
ception and that has largely eluded modern scholarship. I have found 
its traces in texts by Seneca, as well as in now-lost 4th-century Christian 
heretical theories. As we look ahead, it is imperative to recognise and 
reconstruct this materialist intention of the spirit, offering a richer and 
more comprehensive understanding of the historical and philosophical 
development of intention, both before and after Augustine. Indeed, 
this material intention did not completely disappear from the Euro-
pean tradition, but survived in other forms and contexts as the shadow 
of Augustine’s hegemonically proliferating legacy. This study invites 
further exploration into the intricate interplay between pneumatology, 
materialism and intentionality, ultimately enriching our comprehen-
sion of this fundamental philosophical concept.
List of Abbreviations of References 
and Editions Used
The following abbreviations are used for the specified texts and their 
translations when one is provided:
Augustine, Conf. 
Confessionum libri (Confessions)
Augustine. Confessionum libri XIII. Edited by Martin Skutella, H. Juergens, 
and W. Schaub. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1969.
Augustine. Confessions. T ranslated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1991.
Augustine, Ep. 
Epistulae (Letters)
Augustine. S. Augustini Epistulae. Edited by Alois Goldbacher. Vienna: 
Tempsky, 1911.
Augustine. Letters. 6 volumes. Washington: The Catholic University Press, 
1951–1989.

INTENTIO SPIRITUS
115
Augustine, Gn. litt. 
De Genesi ad litteram (On the Literal Meaning of Genesis)
Augustine. La genèse au sens littéral en douze livres / De genesi ad litteram 
libri duodecim. Edited and translated by Paul Agaësse and Aimé Solignac. Paris: 
Declée de Brouwer, 1972.
Augustine. On Genesis: On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees; Unfinished 
Literal Commentary on Genesis; The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Edited by John E. 
r otelle and translated by Edmund Hill. New York: New City Press, 2002.
Augustine, Im. an. 
De immortalitate animae (On the Immortality of the Soul)
Augustine. De immortalitate animae / Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele: Zweis-
prachige Ausgabe. Edited and translated by Christian Tornau. Paderborn: Ferdi-
nand Schöningh, 2020.
Augustine. The Immortality of the Soul; The Magnitude of the Soul; On Music; 
The Advantage of Believing; On Faith in Things Unseen . T ranslated by Ludwig 
Schopp et al. Washington: Catholic University Press, 2002.
Augustine, Mus. 
De musica (On Music)
Augustine. De musica. Edited by Martin Jacobsson. Berlin: De Gruyter, 
2017.
Augustine. The Immortality of the Soul; The Magnitude of the Soul; On Music; 
The Advantage of Believing; On Faith in Things Unseen . T ranslated by Ludwig 
Schopp et al. Washington: Catholic University Press, 2002.
Augustine, Qu. an. 
De quantitate animae (On the Quantity or Magnitude of the Soul)
Augustine. De quantitate animae / The measure of the soul: Latin text, with 
English translation and notes. Edited and translated by Francis E. Tourscher. 
Philadelphia: The Peter r eilly company, 1933.
Augustine, Trin. 
De T rinitate (On the T rinity)
Augustine. De Trinitate Libri I-XII. Edited by W. J. Mountain. T urnhout: 
Brepols, 1968.
Augustine. De Trinitate Libri XIII-XV. Edited by W. J. Mountain. T urnhout: 
Brepols, 1968.
Augustine. The T rinity. T ranslated by Stephen McKenna. Washington: The 
Catholic University Press, 2010.

POLIGrAFI
116
SVF. 
Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (Fragments of the Ancient Stoics)
Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Edited by Hans von Arnim. 4 volumes. 
Leipzig: T eubner, 1903–1924.
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