Understanding Augustine’s Philosophy and Theology
The San Agustin
Verdad No doubt, supracond skeptic: in San Agustin, its Reduced-Flow Series argument of existential error analysis highlights human error. The existence presupposes the truth. Conocimiento:
- Internalization: The objects are characterized by their instability, continence, and how knowledge is not true.
- Transcendence Epistemological: To know is to learn about a stable and permanent object. The soul, through internalization, encounters natural objects that are higher than itself. The soul seeks the truth, which is the higher God.
- Nature of Truth: The truth is one of the essential normative principles that reason maintains in the intelligibility of objects (ideas).
- Necessity of Properties: The properties of ideas must be immutable; they can never change. Eternity is what is immutable.
- Class of Ideas: Agustin distinguishes ideas: logic, mathematics, and ethics.
- Place of Ideas: True ideas are right when they transcend themselves; the truth is something intelligible and immutable.
- Access to Truth: The human soul, in its upper part, maintains truths through intellectual vision. Agustin insists on discovering that the soul is the truth. No reason exists if it is the same.
- Analysis of Enlightenment: The divine illumination is a light that reflects ideas within a mode of images that reflect divinity.
- Notion of Truth: Truth is a conjunction of thought and reality.
Augustinian Theology
The existence of God is a direct consequence of the theory of knowledge. Since God exists, the truth is fundamental: God exists. All Augustinian proofs have the same structure: from the interior to the exterior and the superior.
- Interior to Divine Nature:
- The specific attributes of God’s divinity: God is in its fullness, the eternal truth.
- The Divine Trinity: Unity and Trinity are exclusive to Agustin. Nature proposes a single divine essence in three persons, equal in nature and duration, but in different orders of providence: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
- Divine Properties:
- Excellence of essence and truth.
- Maximum eternity and immutability.
- Provident, prescient, and creator goodness.
- Source of all happiness and immutable order.
Creation of the World
The world has no beginning and is subsistent. The creator God acts out of free will, depending on God. The principle of the eternity of the world denies that everything has a beginning and a temporal end. The mundane world has a beginning and temporal means; it was created with time. Before, the world did not exist in the realm of time.
Anthropology of Augustine
Man is a being composed of two substances: body and soul. The image of the soul is the Trinity; the soul springs from the relationship of knowledge and love. Man was created in the image of God. God, in his eternal Trinity, is absolute love and truth, and man is total.
- Man is a contingent being seeking truth and knowledge, looking for wisdom.
- He needs love and to be loved, for the three faculties of happiness.
Discovery of the Soul
The soul has three faculties: memory, intelligence, and will. The soul, being three different faculties, reflects the unity of God, who is one but has three distinct persons. Each expresses the whole of the soul’s faculties as a Trinity. The presence of the divine is in the memory, knowledge, and love of God.
- Global Steps: The following steps transcend within and into the superior.
- By Faculties:
- Memory: 1st – Sensible, 2nd – Suis, 3rd – Dei.
- Knowledge: 1st – Sons, 2nd – Suis, 3rd – News of God.
- Will: 1st – Right, 2nd – Cot, 3rd – Cot of the right memory of God.
The soul can sense the divine in the intelligible realm. Augustine states that the present is not accounted for; I am and what is God. Knowledge consists of sensible and intelligible classes (the only authentic).