Self as Another

Augustine is charged with being proto-Cartesian when he locates the imago Dei in the mind or soul. Maybe, but we need to ask what he says about that imago . Among other things, he sees the soul’s capacity to beget an inner word that is both different from and yet consubstantial with the soul as the image. That is, the soul is not an image of God in its pure self-presence, but in its self-differentiation. The mind is image in that it is other to itself. Whatever problems there might be here, this, it need hardly be said, is not Cartesian.