Saint Augustine’s City of God: Knowledge, Love, and Creation
This fragment pertains to Chapter 27 of The City of God, entitled ‘SNCI 100cia d 1a and other ERMISSION x san agustin d ipone.’ The author references the idea that humans, unlike animals, possess the capacity for knowledge. This knowledge allows humans to reach God. Animals cannot attain this knowledge, and all elements, except for human beings, are external to knowledge. The fragment also touches upon the existence of good and the absence of evil. Finally, it presents three basic principles: being, knowing, and loving.
The main theme of the fragment is being, knowing, and loving. Saint Augustine proposes that these three are the solutions to creation, love, and enlightenment. The first series of texts develops theses that support the main theme. The primary thesis is that knowledge and self-knowledge are unique to humans, not animals. Through this knowledge, we reach eternal truths via enlightenment. The second thesis is that God created all things in an initial moment, and these things would undergo developments and changes throughout history. The third thesis relates to justice, good, and evil, referring to right and wrong. Lastly, another thesis includes the idea that love, knowledge, and love exist.
To understand the text, we must clarify that light incorporates God. Based on the previously cited concepts, we will explain the text in depth, always based on Saint Augustine’s thought. Regarding the first thesis, the author speaks of how man can know and love, which is his own wisdom. For knowledge to reach the truth, it must undergo a process of interiorization. The author states that truth is something immutable and eternal. From this, we must carry out the first step of fundamentalizing self-knowledge. With what we think, we know that we exist with something immutable. The process of interiorization consists of seeking the immutable truth within oneself, within the mutable soul, which is also formed by sensations that are representations of what is sensible and changeable. If we continue with interiorization, we arrive at rules through which we judge things. These rules are considered eternal and thus outside of knowledge and change. These rules cannot come from the soul or the exterior; they must come from something eternal and immutable, from God. Interiority leads to the discovery of God. The ability to judge things through these rules is called conscience and knowledge of God, ultimately, wisdom. Knowing these rules is achieved through divine illumination, an action carried out by God that allows us to capture what is intelligible.
In the second thesis, we find that things were created to be known because God made creation with its changes and future developments. The mutability of created things is because they came from nothing. Although the creation is temporal, the things that were created do not change over time but within the creation. God created the world and ushered in future changes through the necessary seeds, which means that corporeal beings have latent causes in nature. Species are immutable. The third thesis, related to justice, is also within oneself. Justice, according to Saint Augustine, is a problem of good and evil. Evil is not a pure being; it is the absence of good. Plotinus’ conception of evil (non-being) allows the author to explain that God is good and that evil is not substantial. The author distinguishes two types of evils: moral and physical. Moral evil is sin, the fruit of ill will, which consists of prioritizing what is sensible over God. Physical evil (pain, illness, death) is a consequence of moral evil and original sin.
Lastly, to support the main theme, we find love, charity, and understanding. The fragment concludes that love exists because we know it. Love, as understood here, consists of loving God and, according to God, loving others. Depending on whether one loves God or sensible things, people belong to the city of God or the earthly city.
Context: The text we are commenting on belongs to Saint Augustine of Hippo. He was born in Tagaste (present-day Algeria) in 354, to a pagan father and a Christian mother. In 373, he read Cicero’s work and became interested in philosophy. He adhered to Manichaeism, but found the doctrine insufficient. He became interested in skepticism and then read some Platonic texts. In 386, he converted to Christianity and was ordained a priest in Hippo, where he died in 430. He is a very important patristic figure. Augustine’s writings describe his initial stages and his definitive thought, which led him, after a hectic life, to Christianity. The City of God is situated in his last period of life, a period of great productivity as a writer. His main works are dedicated to Christian dogma and doctrines against the heresies that existed at the time: Manichaeism, Pelagianism, and Donatism. At a philosophical level, we find that the text comments on the strong influence of skepticism that existed in all the academic philosophical schools. Other important works by the author are Confessions and On the Trinity. This text belongs to Book XI. The City of God was written by Saint Augustine of Hippo, among other reasons, to defend Christians against pagan critics. Saint Augustine was forced to respond and inspire courage. Writing the work took 14 years (between 413 and 427), and it represents one of the author’s most laborious writings, in a period where he developed great work as a bishop and defender of Christian doctrine. One of the philosophical currents based on Saint Augustine’s thought is Neoplatonism, which is the first metaphysical-Platonic interpretation of spiritual philosophy that emerged from Plotinus in the 3rd century AD. Saint Augustine approached the truth and considered the existence of many elements of Platonic philosophy that coincided with Christianity. This is due, preferentially, to Saint Augustine’s divine illumination. However, Plato did not come to know Jesus Christ, and this was his philosophical error. Saint Augustine, like Plato, differentiates between intelligible and sensible knowledge, the latter of which only provides opinion. However, in assessing the data, both parties function as a bowl of knowledge, approaching Plotinus. Saint Augustine represents the Plotinian Platonic God (as father) and the Plotinian noûs, the Platonic demiurge, representing the son, the logos, the mind of God, where Augustine’s ideas will survive. The influence of this thought lasted throughout the Middle Ages, especially in the 13th and 14th centuries, in the thought of Anselm of Canterbury, Avicenna, and the Franciscan order, especially Saint Bonaventure. Their theses marked the first line of thought known as Augustinianism. Mrs. Santos, more from Aristotle, will develop another line of thought that will try to overcome the philosophical gaps of Augustinianism. In the Renaissance, there will be a renewed interest in Augustinian Neoplatonism. We can also sense Augustine’s influence on Descartes, who, at an early age, gives his top modern certainty, ‘cogito ergo sum,’ which has a clear antecedent in Augustine’s self-knowledge (if I err, I am).