Augustine Summary

 

  1. Since St. Augustine’s mature philosophical ideas are primarily stemming from the Neo-Platonic tradition, we began our considerations with a brief survey of Platonism.
  2. Plato’s central tenet is his theory of Forms. Although the primary motivation for this theory can be derived from the epistemological need to account for the possibility of a priori knowledge (i.e., necessary, universal knowledge that can be gained on the basis of understanding and reasoning alone, such as mathematical knowledge, as opposed to a posteriori, contingent, empirical, factual knowledge), the theory plays a central role in all philosophical disciplines (metaphysics-physics – being, logic-epistemology – truth, and ethics – goodness). Cf. BK, pp. 114-133, esp. 117-124; City of God, VIII, 1-12.
  3. However, Plato’s original theory is demonstrably inconsistent, as Plato himself realized in his Parmenides. (See the reconstructed arguments online, in the class folder. Make sure you understand them all, and that you are able to reproduce them, if needed.)
  4. As a result, in the Neo-Platonic tradition, Plato’s universal exemplars for each distinct perfection became “concentrated” in the absolutely simple perfection of the One, whose perfection unfolds in a hierarchy of emanations of ever decreasing perfection, through the World Soul, to human souls, and to the forms of material beings imposing some partial order on chaotic formless matter. It is this idea of an ontological hierarchy that is the most appealing to Augustine’s Christian thought, identifying Plotinus’ One with the Supreme Being and Goodness, the Christian God, whose eternal ideas will take on the function of Plato’s Forms, as the universal archetypes of God’s creation. (See the section on Divine Ideas in my article on “The Medieval Problem of Universals” URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/.)
  5. But besides finding this “natural match” between Platonic metaphysics and the Christian idea of God’s relation to His creation (to be sure, despite substantial disagreements on important details, see cf. Spade, Survey, pp. 40-50.), Augustine was very strongly influenced by Platonic epistemological and ethical ideas as well.
  6. We first focused on one particular epistemological argument, in the context of a larger moral-theological argument, in Augustine’s “On the Free Choice of the Will”. Here I provide the outline of the larger argument; you have the details of the epistemological argument in my article on universals.
  7. In the first book of “On the Free Choice of the Will”, Augustine and his interlocutor, Evodius, delved into the problem of the origin of evil in the world. This clearly is  a serious problem for a Christian, who can see the obvious conflict in the conception of a world manifestly containing horrendous evils, despite its being the creation of an omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely benevolent God. According to the conclusion of the first book, it is certainly not God who is to blame for the presence of evil, but rather man, who abuses his God-given free will to do wrong.
  8. But then the question naturally arises: if God gave free will, and he could foresee that man would abuse it, why didn’t He prevent evil from arising by simply not giving free will to man in the first place? (For the Augustinian answer check The Origin of Moral Evil.)
  9. Addressing the further problems stemming from this consideration is the main topic of the second book. In order to solve the inconsistency between free will’s being the source of evil and its being God’s gift, the interlocutors have to go back to check their original assumptions, namely, whether free will is really God’s gift, indeed, whether there is a God in the first place, to give such a (dubious) gift.
  10. The starting point of the argument in c. 3 is the absolute certainty of one’s own existence. (Augustine’s favorite kind of certainty, exploited time and again in his writings from the youthful “Against the Academicians”, written specifically against the skepticism of the New Academy, to the late “The City of God”. The idea is to have a great career in modern philosophy after Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum.)
  11. The subsequent considerations in cc. 3-6 are designed to establish (a) that there is a an objective hierarchical arrangement of things in nature (an issue we shall deal with in greater detail); (b) that reason is on the top of this hierarchy, and (c) that if there is something superior to reason, then it is either God, or something to which God is superior; whence, either way, if something is superior to reason, then God exists.
  12. Chapters 7-14 are designed to prove that there is something superior to reason, namely, the eternal truths of number (c. 8) and of wisdom (cc. 9-14). It is in this context that we find Augustine’s “embedded” epistemological argument mentioned in 6 above. The important point of the argument (reconstructed here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/#5.2) is that our knowledge of mathematical truths is not derivable from experience, whence we must have received it from a supernatural source. This is the characteristic Augustinian theory of illumination, which will have a long and bright career in the Middle Ages and in early modern rationalism.
  13. Chapters 9-14 are analogous considerations concerning other a priori truths, the “rules of wisdom”, which Augustine shows to be superior to reason, insofar as reason cannot judge them whether they ought to be the way they are (they simply have to be the way they are, and reason can just enjoy if it manages to discover them --  cf. BK, pp. 89-90 and http://www.fordham.edu/gsas/phil/klima/phil180/PlatoinMath.html); reason rather judges other things, inferior and/or equal to itself, in accordance with these rules, namely, whether these things are the way they ought to be – this is again the Platonic use of Forms and the eternal truths they validate as norms or standards by which we judge things whether they live up to them. (We’ll discuss the issue of the relationship between Forms or Divine Ideas and eternal truths and Truth Itself in more detail later.)
  14. Chapter 15 finally draws the conclusion that God exists. Note Evodius’ reaction: “my inner voice shouts” – this is the ecstatic Platonic moment of the sudden flash of understanding, mentioned in the (perhaps spurious, but doctrinally quite authentic) 7th letter of Plato.
  15. This conclusion allows the interlocutors to return to the ethical considerations that prompted this “excursion”. Chapters 16-17 establish that all being, and hence, all order and perfection derives from God. Note the analogy of the craftsman who follows the (mathematical!) rules of his art, to God the Creator (cf. the picture on p. 105 of BK.). This is again an issue we’ll spend some time on. For now, to see the significance of the issue, check out (yes, again!) Spade’s Survey, c. 4, especially pp. 45-47.
  16. Finally, the closing chapters of our selection deal with the issue that since moral evil is the lack of the proper direction of the will, and a lack, a defect, a deformity cannot come from the giver of perfection and form, evil cannot come from God. Evil is rather just the deformity and defectiveness of a God-given good thing, the free will of a rational creature. This is another definitive Platonic-Augustinian theme: evil is just the absence/deprivation of the good (malum est privatio boni ) – and so this is another issue that we shall dwell on for some time. (For later developments of the idea see (yes, again) my lecture note on Boethius : http://www.fordham.edu/gsas/phil/klima/lectures.htm#Boethius; we shall have to revisit this issue several times, in several contexts, so it is not a waste of your time if you ponder it time and again.)
  17. Given the ontological hierarchy that provides the frame of reference for the proper direction of the will, and the realization that this proper direction is “upwards”, one task naturally emerging for a human being in this life is obvious: the task is to find out exactly what realizes in this life the “uplifting” of the soul, its approximation of divine perfection to the extent that this is possible at all within the confines of our finite nature. This is what Augustine attempts to characterize through the analysis of the journey of one particular soul in this life, the soul he knows best, his own. At the end of the analysis of this soul’s travel through time, when it has finally reached its reachable destination here, namely, peace in God, Augustine is in a position to look back on his entire life from an entirely new vantage point, mimicking the vantage point of God over His creation. This is what provides Augustine with an opportunity of a profound reflection on the difference between temporal being, the natural mode of existence of everything in physical reality, and eternity, the mode of existence of God. (For further details see Time and Eternity in Augustine, and BK. 99-113.