St. Augustine’s Philosophy: Faith, Reason, and Human Existence
Reason and Faith
For Augustine, humans yearn for happiness and the enjoyment of the highest good, which he identified with God. This requires knowing the truth, sought through reason (philosophy) and faith (religion). These are not incompatible; faith guides our search, and reason helps us understand faith: “He understands to believe, believe and understand.”
Theory of Knowledge
Augustine’s theory posits that our truth-seeking is driven by love. Good love (charity) prioritizes God and others, creating the heavenly city. Bad love (pleasure) focuses on earthly desires, forming the earthly city. True knowledge comes from spiritual, ordered love, not selfish desires.
Augustine’s theory moves from the exterior to the interior, then upward. It starts with sensory knowledge, which is uncertain, and seeks indubitable truth. Like Descartes later, Augustine finds certainty in self-consciousness: even if mistaken, thinking proves existence. Truth resides within.
Spiritual ascent involves two levels: discursive knowledge (science) and intuitive knowledge of eternal truths (beauty, justice, goodness). This higher knowledge requires divine illumination, where love and reason converge. This sets human knowledge on the threshold of divinity, without fully penetrating it. Just as the eye needs light, the mind needs divine light to know truth.
Existence of God and Creation
Proofs for God’s Existence
Eternal truths, being immutable, cannot originate from mutable humans; their foundation must be God. God’s existence is also evident in the universe’s order and universal consensus.
Nature of God
God is supreme, good, immortal, and eternal. God is a Trinity: Father, Son (Mind), and Holy Spirit (Love).
Creation Theory
Augustine defends the theory of copies: God created the world based on pre-existing ideas in His mind. God is transcendent, creating from nothing, using these ideas as prototypes. Created beings, being material, are imperfect. God implanted seminal reasons in all things, which evolve over time according to Providence.
Man, Freedom, and History
Problem of Evil
The world’s existence doesn’t negate God or prove an “evil principle.” Physical evil is the privation of good, due to creatures’ imperfection. Moral evil arises from free will.
Human Nature and Free Will
Augustine’s anthropology is dualistic: soul (immortal) and body (mortal). God granted free will to choose between good and evil. Augustine rejects reincarnation and supports traducianism: the soul, inheriting original sin, needs grace for salvation. Grace doesn’t suppress freedom but strengthens the will to do good, achieving true freedom.
Virtue and Peace
Virtue is “ordered love,” respecting God’s order and achieving peace, which is the tranquility of order, guaranteed by justice and law.
Two Cities
History is a struggle between the city of God (spiritual love) and the earthly city (disordered material love). Divine Providence ensures the heavenly city’s victory, without negating human freedom. God foresees our actions but doesn’t determine them; our choices depend on free will.
On Free Will
Augustine’s work on free will, written in dialogue form, explores freedom, moral evil, sin, the relationship between reason and faith, and God’s existence.
Historical and Sociocultural Context
St. Augustine (354-430) lived during a period of significant change.
- Historical Context: Spread of Christianity, Roman persecutions, Edict of Milan, Arianism, Council of Nicaea, Theodosius’s Edict, fall of the Western Roman Empire.
- Sociocultural Context: Third-century crisis, ruralization, feudalism, Germanic invasions, cultural Renaissance, Christian art and architecture.
Philosophical Framework
Greek rationalism declined into ethical systems (Stoicism, Epicureanism). Religious movements and philosophical currents intersected, leading to syncretism and eclecticism.
Christian writers used diatribe, allegory, and the concept of creation ex nihilo. Christianity proposed a linear view of history. The relationship between faith and reason became central.
Non-Christian influences included Stoicism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism. Augustine adopted Plotinus’s concept of evil as the absence of good.
Christian philosophy developed through stages: New Testament, Apologies, and the Fathers of the Church.
- Greek Fathers: Influenced by Platonism (Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen).
- Latin Fathers: Influenced by Cicero and Seneca, developed coherent theological doctrine (Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory, Augustine).