Saint Augustine: Ethics, Anthropology, and Knowledge
Ethics, Freedom, and Free Will
Augustine’s ethics are eudemonistic, as the end of human conduct is happiness or bliss. This bliss can only be found in God with the help of divine grace. The will impels the soul to God through love (charity).
Saint Augustine defined evil as a privation; evil is the absence of good. The soul, whose nature is directed to God, turns from His way and becomes a slave of the body. Evil comes from the improper use man makes of his free will. Thus, man is responsible for evil, not God.
God does not restrict us so we can be held accountable for our actions in the afterlife. Saint Augustine distinguishes between free will, which is the ability of human beings to act voluntarily and that original sin tends to evil, and freedom, which is the ability to make good use of free will. The human soul is a fallen soul because of original sin and needs to get out of divine grace that will give you true freedom: the good use of free will.
Anthropology
Man is the masterpiece of creation. He consists of a soul (immortal) and a body (mortal). Saint Augustine believes that human beings have a rational soul that is capable of knowing. The human soul is characterized by:
- Being formed by a lower ratio that is capable of knowing things, and a higher reason that allows us to contemplate the eternal truths through divine illumination.
- Being immortal, and striving for ultimate happiness (bliss) observing the eternal truths (which are also immortal).
- Having been created by God and therefore temporary. Saint Augustine cannot decide if the soul is created individually (creationism) or transmitted from parents to children (traducianism).
- Having three faculties: memory, which is equivalent to God; intelligence, God’s children; and love, which is equivalent to the Holy Spirit.
The soul is the principle that gives life to the body but is superior to it and cannot, therefore, be affected by the body. To explain the feelings, the body receives the stimulus and the soul produces an image. For Saint Augustine, man is “a rational soul that uses a mortal body.” Augustine defends the substantial union of body and soul, since both are created by God. Thus, the body becomes the prison of the soul because of original sin, which will be waged.
Saint Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge: Reason and Faith
Overcoming Skepticism
For Saint Augustine, the human being aspires to achieve happiness and truth, and for him, both are in God. The road that leads to Christ requires faith (religion), which must be understood with the procedures of reason, and reason (philosophy), which is fallible and inadequate and that without faith is prone to error and is unable to achieve truth alone.
Reason and faith are complementary and are not inconsistent but have to work together: faith directs our intelligence in the search for truth, and reason allows us to understand the contents of faith. We must not understand to believe, but believe to understand. So faith is the means to truth and not the end.
Augustine argues that the search for truth is necessary because human beings have an innate tendency toward wisdom that they should try to satisfy. According to this argument, truth makes us wise, and wisdom is true happiness (bliss). Knowledge is driven by a spiritual love (charity), which seeks to rise to the only truth, unchanging and eternal, which is God.
Levels of Knowledge
Having overcome skepticism, Augustine distinguishes three levels of knowledge:
- Sensitive knowledge: Information received by the senses, but this information is subject to constant change and mistakes, leading to uncertain knowledge.
- Rational knowledge (proper to humans): Human beings can make judgments based on concrete reality in intangible, universal, and eternal models. Knowledge arises when our senses capture a visible object and our mind recognizes and identifies it as. The truth is “the adequacy of the intellect to the thing.” These truths are logical truths and are beyond reason. To justify these truths, Augustine uses the ideas that need copies of a being that contains them, God. We can say that He is the truth, the only necessary and eternal reality (ontological truth).
- Contemplation of eternal ideas: The highest level of knowledge is the contemplation of eternal ideas through the mind apart from the senses. This contemplation leads to wisdom and enlightenment, made possible by the divine light of God that enlightens the human soul, making it capable of grasping the ideas. With contemplation, we will find the truth, God.