Augustine’s Philosophy: Self-Knowledge, Faith, and Reason
Lesson 5: Augustine’s Path to God
Augustine posits that the soul has three capacities:
- Memory: Access and awareness of ourselves.
- Understanding: Comprehending the rational world order.
- Will: Aiming to meet a personal God who created mankind out of love.
For Augustine, wisdom is subordinate to love.
Believe and Understand
The desire for perfection opens the door to faith, revealing who God is and what He expects. Augustine emphasizes love as the core of all commandments. Wisdom, according to Augustine, lies in the desire to believe in order to understand. This necessity highlights the relationship between faith and reason.
Complementarity Between Faith and Reason
Augustine believed that faith and reason must be complementary because truth is singular. God gave us reason, not to err, but to seek truth. Faith precedes reason.
Faith and Reason Need Each Other
Augustine’s triple point:
- Self-knowledge is the starting point of all knowledge.
- Faith encourages overcoming our shortcomings.
- In the light of faith, reality becomes comprehensible.
Augustine vs. Plato
Realism:
- Ontological Dualism:
- Plato (P): Material/imperfect ideas.
- Augustine (A): Material/ideas in the mind of God.
Human Being:
- Body-Soul Dualism:
- P: Pre-existence and immortality of the soul.
- A: The soul is immortal, but not pre-existing.
Knowledge:
- P: Reminiscence (knowledge as recall).
- A: Illumination (the soul receives the light of knowledge from God).
Moral:
- P: Intellectualism (knowledge of the good makes us good).
- A: Voluntarism (the will, with God’s help, inclines us to the right).
A Revolutionary Concept: Idea Creation
Augustine states that God creates in a timeless, free, and voluntary act, as He is absolute good and infinite love.
The Problem of Evil
Augustine’s solution to the problem of evil contrasts with the Manichean view (which postulates the existence of both good and evil). For Augustine, evil is the shadow in the dissemination of good.
Tenets to Host the Truth: Ideas as Specimens
God, as creator, is both the efficient cause (what produced the world) and the formal cause (what makes the world as it is).
Plato defended the existence of a permanent, unchanged, and intangible reality – the world of ideas – without which the eternal concept of truth has no meaning.
Augustine: the world of ideas exists in divine intellect. These ideas are due and formal reality is that these things respond to a definition.
God as the Light of Knowledge
Theory of Light:
Seeing objects requires not only the objects themselves but also illumination. Similarly, understanding truth requires a light that illuminates.
Plato chose the Sun as what allowed the order of reality and also the possibility of our knowing it.
Augustine: only radiates the light of the reality that God makes possible knowledge.
God as a Sort of Reality
Plato introduced the idea of eros, the longing for what matches our nature, impelling us to follow the path of knowledge.
Augustine speaks of a tendency for things to fulfill their own definition, which he calls pondus (incorporated in every human impulse which this am trying to take his own site).
For him, God is the final cause that determines the sense and the good of our lives.
Free Will to Freedom
God created man with both will and free will (choice). Evil arises when an inferior choice is preferred over a superior one.
Augustine defines freedom as doing what is best, that of obedience to God. Free will is the ability to choose good or evil.
Choosing evil can be an act of free will, but not of freedom.
Freedom, Salvation, and Determinism
- Platonic and Aristotelian: The freer a person is, the more subjected to reason, even if in the end it is necessary to follow what reason considers good.
- Stoical: Denied the capacity to choose and placed human lives at fate.
- Christianity: Will is able to be above any force, whether as the target point. Humans are responsible for the evil.
- Augustine: Divine omniscience is not incompatible with the capacity to choose. God’s knowledge of our choices does not negate our ability to choose.