Saint Augustine

Article 2. St. Augustine Aur el ius August inus (354-430).

Life: Augustine was born at Tagaste in Numidia, November 13, 354. His father, Patricius, was a pagan nobleman, who was converted to Christianity towards the end of his life. His mother, Monica, was a lifelong Christian and a Saint. Great in talent, noble in mind, and favored by the pious watchfulness of a holy mother, Augustine, nevertheless, fell a prey to the influence of the evil example of the companions of his youth. His habits became dissolute, and he refused to heed his mother’s prayer that he seek in Christianity the truth to satisfy his mind, and the ideals and strength necessary for an upright life. He joined the Manicheans, who boasted that theirs was the perfect science—the truth that did not enslave the intellect as Christianity did. A short association with these sectaries convinced his alert mind that they were not at all so sure of the truth of their doctrines as they pretended to be. In his doubts he consulted Faustinus, a Manichean Bishop, and came away from the conference more doubtful than before. Finally, he broke with the Manicheans and adopted a skeptical or agnostic philosophy. He was, during this time, a teacher of rhetoric and grammar at Tagaste, and afterwards at Carthage. In 383 he went to Rome, and a year later to Milan, whither his saintly mother followed him. His love of rhetoric (oratory) moved him to hear the great St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who was esteemed a most eloquent preacher. The sermons of the Saint, together with his mother’s prayers, opened Augustine’s heart to the power, the grace, and the truth of Christianity. He was baptized by St. Ambrose in 387. He decided to return with his mother to Africa, but St. Monica died before they set sail from Italy, and Augustine remained in Rome for another year. In 388 he went home, sold his property, gave the proceeds to the poor, and took up the life of a solitary, dividing his time between exercises of piety and literary work. Ordained priest despite his fears of the dignity and responsibility of that great office, he discharged his sacred duties with exemplary exactitude and zeal. Four years after his ordination (395) he was made coadjutor-bishop of Hippo, and a year later succeeded to the office on the death óf Valerius, the incumbent. He died in office, August, 28, 430.

Works: Omitting letters, the works of St. Augustine are ninety-three in number, and these are distributed in 232 books. These works may be divided into philosophical, apologetico-dogmatic, and exegetical treatises. Important for philosophy are the following: Of the Beautiful and the Becoming; Refutation of the Academians; Of the Happy Life which is found in the knowledge, love, and service of God ; Of the Immortality of the Soul; Of the Quantity of the Sold, a dialogue on the origin and nobility of the immortal soul, and on its relation to the body in man; Of Free Choice, a treatise on freewill in refutation of the Manichean theory of evil. Of the applogetico-dogmatical works, the philosonher must notice : On the True Religion, a philosophical treatise showing that reason and authority point the way to the Catholic Church as the true Church of God; Confessions; Retractions or revisions of his works; Of the Trinity; The City of God, a refutation of paganism and its philosophy, and a rebuttal of the heathen theory that Christianity was the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire ; this book also contains a summary of Christian Doctrine and a discussion of the Kingdom of God in this world (the Church) and the next (Heaven).

Doctrine: We may divide Augustine’s philosophical teachings, and discuss them under three heads : Logic, Physics, Ethics. i. In Logic, St. Augustine asserts the possibility of acquiring certitude, thus contradicting the doctrine of the skeptics. He maintains that the field of human certitude is very restricted, many mysteries being outside its proper scope. He teaches that the conditions necessary in the will that it may give perfect assent to things that are certain, are uprightness, purity, humility. Of the conditions necessary for certainty in the intellect we must speak more in detail : Our senses give us knowledge, and the senses are reliable; when they seem to err and to deceive us, the error is in our judgment and not in the report of the senses. And how shall we correct mistaken judgment; how shall we come to a proper knowledge of things in the world of sense? By cultivating the knowledge of God; for when we have once acquired a clear idea of God, this idea lends an illumination to the mind which makes it understand the creatures of God which our senses make known to us. In sensation and in intellection the knowledge of God is a light that shows us truth with certainty. God contains in Himself the rationes aeternae, i. e., eternal models or patterns of the natures of things He creates; and these are created as planned. Now to know God more and more thoroughly is to advance more and more in the real understanding of the rationes aeternae of things which are in God and one with Him. Thus to know God is to know His creation. Our ideas, therefore, which are the elements of knowledge, and of certain knowledge in much that we know, come to us by abstraction of the intellect from sensations; but, as has been said, once the idea of God has been acquired, it serves as a great light to the mind, enabling us to form other ideas clearly and to make true and certain judgments. ii. St. Augustine includes in the field of Physics what is usually assigned to that of Metaphysics; in this department he discusses God, the world, and man. He proves the existence of God from the fact that the world is contingent, i. e., does not explain itself, and is not in itself a reason for its own existence. Such a being must have come from a creative cause which is non-contingent (or necessary’), and this is God. Other proofs for God’s existence are drawn from the nature of our soul, and from the nature of our knowledge. St. Augus-tine speaks eloquently and profoundly of the attributes of God, proving that God is one, all-perfect, infinite, eternal, simple. He teaches that God’s knowledge is one with the divine essence. God knows changelessly and from eternity all things actual and possible; and these “ideas” (in God and of His essence) are the stable and unchanging exemplary forms of things. Note that these forms are not in the divine intellect accidentally, as a modification of the divine mind, but are the exemplary cause of things and formally one with the essence of God. St. Augustine thought that this was Plato’s meaning in the famous Theory of Ideas, for Plato makes the Subsistent Real Idea of The Good (God) contain all ideas. The divine will is the divine essence, immutable, eternal, wholly free. God was not moved to produce things by necessity; His infinite goodness diffused itself in creation. God created all things outside Himself from nothing.‘He did not create all things in the same state of perfection, but in various grades of perfection. Here St. Augustine contradicts the pantheism of the Gnostics and Manicheans. He declared that the soul is not an emanation of the divine substance, and rejected the world-soul theory as impious and utterly unreasonable. In creating, God called all things into existence at one and the same moment. The Hexahemeron (or six days of creation mentioned in Genesis) has not a time significance, but indicates the causal order in creation. All species of living things, therefore, existed in germ from the beginning. This means that God gave to determinate particles of matter a preternatural power or seed-force (rationes seminales), so that they would develop into determinate species of living things at a moment foreordained by God. God did not endow matter with the seed-force of developing into man; from eternity He decreed to create man from the slime of the earth, and the particles of earth from which Adam’s body was made existed from the moment of creation : in this sense Adam preexisted invisibly and potentially before his actual appearance as man upon earth. But there was no planting of the ratio seminalis of man in brute matter, as there was the planting of rationes seminales of non-human living things in brute matter. The world exhibits in itself a perfect order and unity. The world is perfect in the sense that its perfections came from God and are conserved by Him. It is not, absolutely speaking, the most perfect world that God could make but it has all the perfections it needs for the purpose for which God made it. Augustine did not know Aristotle’s doctrine of Prime Matter, but he unknowingly agrees with it. He teaches that the substratum of bodies (Prime Matter) is the lowest thing in the order of entity or being in the world, and has in itself no actuality. Prime Matter is determined by various forms and so constitutes the determinate bodily universe. Prime Matter existed antecedently to forms, not in time (for Prime Matter cannot have actual existence in itself and independently of forms), but by nature, as, for example, the sound of the voice is antecedent to singing. In the visible world man holds the chief place; reason (by which man exhibits the Divine Image) makes him superior to all other things in the visible creation. Man is, however, inferior to the angels because his bodily life is mortal. The soul of man is a spiritual substance, wholly present in every part of his body. It is immortal. St. Augustine proves the immortality of the soul from the nature of our knowledge : We know things as eternally true, changelessly the same (as, for example, that two and two are four). But eternal truths cannot be present in a being as in a subject unless that being is eternal. Therefore the eternal truths in the soul as in a subject indicate that the soul will endure eternally. Augustine is not sure of himself on the subject of the origin of the soul. He admits in one of his letters to St. Jerome (No. 166) that Creationism (the doctrine that God creates and infuses each individual soul directly) satisfies the intellect better than Traducianism (the theory that the soul is derived from the souls of the parents, as a candle is lighted from other candles without diminishing their flame or taking anything from their substance), but that he finds difficulty in explaining the inheritance of original sin on the creationist principle. In the Retractions St. Augustine says (I, c. i), “what the origin of the soul is I did not know then [at the time of writing what he now revises], and I do not know now.” Most historians call St. Augustine a Tradncianist, and it is certain that he did incline to the Traducianist theory. His only reason for doing so was the fact that he believed it the clearest explanation of the doctrine of original sin; yet we must not omit to notice his hesitancy in advocating this theory. He calls the union of body and soul accidental, and declares the body-soul relation to be inexplicable. Had he abandoned this Platonic error, he would have had no difficulty in explaining original sin on the basis of creationism. iii. In Ethics St. Augustine teaches that man has a freewill, and that human freedom is in no wise limited or thwarted by God’s foreknowledge of man’s free acts. Man tends necessarily to happiness, but he chooses freely the objects in which he reposes the expectation of happiness. The true object of happiness, i. e., the object whose possession will bring true happiness, is God alone; and St. Augustine cites Plato in support of this doctrine. Now God is possessed in the most perfect way by the highest of man’s faculties; man is to possess God by intellect (knowledge) and mil (love). In the life to come, man is to achieve heaven, and possess God by immediate perception of the divine essence in the Beatific Vision. The whole of man’s earthly life is meant to be di rected towards the achievement of the Beatific Vision in the life to come. How is life to be lived in view of this desired result? By conducting it according to the Eternal Law, the divine reason which ordains that the natural order of things be conserved and forbids that it be disturbed. The law of the natural order (i. e., the Natural Law) is written in our hearts by the Creator. Thus, the ultimate norm of morality is the Eternal Law; the proximate norm is the Natural Law written in our hearts, i. e., Conscience. He who lives in accordance with the Norm of Morality acquires virtue, which is a stable quality of the soul by which one lives rightly and uses nothing in an evil way. Besides acquired virtue, there is infused virtue, “which God works in us, without our cooperation.” Virtue is an operative habit (i. e., a stable disposition of soul which inclines to action’) for the active avoidance of evil and the active accomplishment of good. The chief virtue is Charity (i. e., love of God and neighbor), and all other virtues are based upon this. Even the Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance) are but modifications of Charity. The Passions are movements of spirit morally indifferent in themselves, and become good or bad according as they are ruled or not ruled by right reason. The chief passions are : joy, or expansion of spirit; sadness, or contraction of spirit; cupidity, the forereaching of spirit; and fear, the retraction or drawing back of spirit. Evil is not a being in itself ; it is rather a non-being; and it consists in the loss or privation of good. Physical evil is the privation of a physical perfection that should be present: loss of sight, for example, is a physical evil. Moral evil is the privation of a moral perfection that should be present: sin is a moral evil, being the privation of that conformity which should exist between man’s free act and the Norm of Morality which is Conscience, and, ultimately, the Eternal Law (Divine Reason). God is not the author of evil; He is sometimes accidentally the cause of physical evil, i. e., He does not will such evil (physical) for its own sake, but for the con servation of the universal order. God is neither the accidental nor the direct cause of moral evil; this comes from the freewill of creatures; and God permits moral evil because He will not destroy free-will even in those who abuse it, and besides He knows how to draw good out of evil.

Remarks: In St. Augustine’s Logic we see a hint of Ontol-ogism, the doctrine that man does not rise from the knowledge of creatures to the knowledge of the Creator, but, vice versa, descends from the knowledge of the Creator to that of creatures; or rather, that man has some direct or intuitive grasp of God, and, by reason of this knowledge, can form ideas of creatures. But St. Augustine is not an Ontologist, for he teaches that ideas are acquired through the senses and the activity of the intellect; even the idea of God is acquired in this way ; and once this idea is acquired, he teaches, it serves as a great illumination to the mind, and aids it in the formation of other ideas and judgments. Faith is also a means of possessing God intellectually, and is therefore a factor in the “intellectual illumination” which the knowledge of God brings to man. And, finally, God is the efficient cause of the light of understanding possessed by man, and for this reason also God is justly called the “intellectual illumination” of men. This interpretation goes flatly against the judgment of most historians of philosophy, but it seems the true one, for it is the only explanation that squares with the following loci in St. Augustine’s writings: De Genesi ad Literam, IV, 40, 41,049; Confessiones, VII, n. 23; De Trinitate, VIII, 1 ; De Trinitate, XV, 5.—In Physics St. Augustine asserts the rationes seminales theory, which is to be rejected as gratuitous, and because it involves a continual miraculous intervention of God in the development of things. Notice that the theory is not one of Transformism or Evolution. St. Augustine does not speak of one species developing by its seed-force into another species; he teaches that brute matter is endowed with the germ or seedforce needed to develop it into a determinate species, and that there are as many seed-forces (rationes seminales) insown from the beginning in matter as there are to be species of things ; nowhere does he teach that a species develops outwardly into another species. His doctrine on the origin of man is not in open conflict with truth ; it may be regarded as a somewhat fantastic and inadequate expression of true doctrine. But we must reject Traducianism or the doctrine that souls of children are derived from the souls of their parents. This doctrine is in contradiction to the very nature of simple spiritual substance, and, moreover, it was favored by the Saint because he mistakenly believed it necessary for the proper understanding of the doctrine of inherited original sin, and not because his keen intellect found it a satisfying theory in itself. St. Augustine was the outstanding philosopher of the Patristic age. He was blessed with splendid talent and with unflagging energy. The number of his works is simply astounding, and they are marked by a keenness of penetration and a depth of thought that set them above the rest of the scientific literature of the times. No important problem of philosophy was left uninvestigated by the Saint, and even when he failed of achieving the truth, he carried his quest of it deeper than did the other Fathers. Philosophy owes much to the great Bishop of Hippo. Among other matters of value, we must mention his clear doctrines on the nature of the soul, the reliability of human knowledge, and the distinction between sensation and intellectual knowledge. Most of St. Augustine’s errors are traceable to his Platonic training; had he known Aristotle well, we should have had an Aquinas before the 13 century.

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY (8 to 17 century inclusive) PRELIMINARY REMARKS Although the philosophy of St. Augustine was discussed at the end of the last Book, it must be recalled that he was not the latest Father in point of time. Fathers of the later centuries—up to the 8—were mentioned in the Chapter preceding that on St. Augustine. It is true that these later Fathers did nothing great in the field of philosophy, but they kept tradition intact and thus served to bridge the long gap that stretches, in intellectual history, between the 4 and the 8 centuries. Scholastic Philosophy was the outstanding system of the Medieval Period. Indeed, the history of Scholasticism is the history of philosophy of the Middle Ages. In tracing the progress of this great system, the historian must discuss incidentally all the other and minor philosophies of the age, for all of these have a more or less distinct bearing upon Scholastic Philosophy. The most important of such minor systems were certain Arabian and Jewish philosophies. Direct anti-Scholas-ticism among Europeans belongs integrally to the history of Scholastic Philosophy itself. The present Book deals, therefore, with Scholastic Philosophy, that splendid and perfected system of speculation which alone, of all the systems formulated by men in the continuous course of philosophical endeavor, meets at all points the requirements of a complete rational inquiry into knowable things. 168