Book notes on Augustine

(Originally written November 14, 2006 in Book 11)

Notes on Augustine cont'd

The Inner Struggle

Acute sense of sin

Augustine has an acute or abnormal sense of sin.

The modern mind sees Augustine's youth as normal; whereas he sees it as evidence of a diseased soul.

Augustine claims to enjoy sin for the sake of sinning.

Attitude toward sex

Sex was evidence of corruption in Augustine's reflection.

Today's culture finds it hard to understand Augustine's sense of guilt. Despite being unmarried he remained faithful to one woman and compared to his contemporaries was a model of sexual morality.

Like Paul, and many other early Christians, Augustine had a particular horror of the sexual aspect of life possibly because he had a strong sexual drive.

He held that sexual activities should be rigidly limited to the purpose of procreation.

Intellectual Pride

Augustine felt he had committed the sin of "intellectual arrogance". He felt he could reason the mysteries of the universe and discover independently the nature of reality.

Augustine became skeptical of orthodoxy with the problem of evil and was troubled by the naive anthropomorphism of his mother's sect.

He saw that the Christian Scriptures were riddled with contradictions if taken literally.

Augustine's Manichaeism

The problem of evil caused Augustine to gravitate towards Manichaeism. He was a follower of Manichaeism for nine years.

The appeal of Manichaeism was its use of reason over faith contra to Catholic Christianity.

Augustine sought certitude above all else. Augustine developed a belief that if one died in error he/she was to stiffen eternal damnation.

Augustine's drive for intellectual certainty was not intellectual curiosity or the Greek search for happiness; it was a desperate need for salvation.

Years of intellectual effort left Augustine to conclude that truth could not be reached via reason.

Because of this revelation he regarded his time under the influence of Manichaeism as a sinful period of intellectual sin.

Augustine's Neoplatonism

In Milan, Augustine made the acquaintance of Ambrose. From Ambrose he learned that interpreting the Bible allegorically one could make the naïveté and its inconsistencies vanish.

By using Neoplatonic metaphysics he could further dispel these inconsistencies more.

Neoplatonism notion of a deity as a creative force or energy, rather than as a crudely anthropomorphic architect thing fit well into Augustine's scheme.

Neoplatonism also seemed to provide a solution to the problem of evil.

Augustine concluded that the physical world was a product of God's creative force and thus not at all evil. Evil is simply an incompleteness and a finitude resulting from the creature's inevitable separation from its maker.

If evil was a positive thing then the problem of evil would be impossible to overcome; but, if it were a negative thing as Neoplatonism held, Augustine concluded that there was no problem of evil.

Augustine had convinced himself of the truthfulness of Orthodoxy, but did not feel an inner sense of peace. Sin still plagued him.

He felt his will was divided. He was helpless.

Augustine's conversion

Augustine's conversion is a fascinating and revealing psychological account

Augustine's mission

From 386 AD on he was steadfastly a Christian. He knew he was still going to be tempted, but the inner peace he found in Christianity saved him. He sought to give others that inner peace if he could.

He was convinced that his conversion would be a lesson to others.

His fight against heresy was manifested especially strong in his fight against Manichaeism.

He sought to create a rational synthesis of Christianity, but he knew he would need God's help.

Doctrine of Catholic faith was fairly well set by Augustine's time; but, it was not neatly or tightly bound in formal doctrine.

Augustine sought to create a synthesis of loose Christian Doctrine, canonical works, Augustine's own sense of sin and worthlessness and his dualistic views into a Catholic doctrine.

Augustine divided his doctrine into two parts:
1) Concerning God
2) Concerning God's creations

Augustine's Concept of God

As a mystic and a devout Christian Augustine wrote with a fervent piety.

As a philosopher, God was the focal point of Augustine. He had strong metaphysical interest.

His interest in the nature of reality was primarily concerned with the supernatural. He sought to find a satisfactory object of religious faith.

As a Christian, Augustine used religious terms.

Plato and Augustine shared similar metaphysical outlooks.

God - Reality is immutable

Augustine (and Plato) held that ultimate reality must be immutable and impervious to change and decay.

Both concluded that because the sensible would change and it cannot be wholly real.

If God is perfect then He will not change because change will result in a loss of perfection.

The problem, the problem of change was a difficulty for Augustine. But, Augustine could not rely on old Greek strategies for dealing with change because God created the world, thus the world must be something. It can't be mere appearance.

Augustine arrived at a divided reality.

God-Reality is creative

Augustine did not solve Plato's problem, he substituted another more difficult one for it.

The problem of relationship between God and man substituted for the problem of appearance and reality. This new problem was further complicated by the Dogmatic law that God created the world ex nihilo.

The creation act was for Augustine a divine fiat.

God's creative ability and man's are different in kind, not in desire. Thus, is God's creative power intelligible?

Augustine as a philosopher wanted to give a rational account of creation, but religious sentiments kept him from abandoning faith altogether.

Augustine (like Plato) held that there must be a certainty in the world of flux. For Plato, mathematics was this certainty. For Augustine it was a self. If one doubts his own existence on proves he exists because no thing that does not exist cannot doubt.

Augustine was relatively unconcerned with the problem of knowledge. Reasons for this disinterest include:
1) a complete interest in peace or security
2) reason was inadequate for reaching truth.

Knowledge was validated by God's goodness, not logic for Augustine.

While Augustine was deeply religious, he was a phenomenal philosopher. His argument for the existence of self was the starting point of modern philosophy via Descartes.

God-Reality is Eternal

God is eternal. Plato held this, but Augustine's religious mind made the eternality of God more vital to his metaphysics.

God made Time and is thus not limited by it,

The past and future is divisible into the minutest of instances, but the present is only the exact moment we experience.

There are neither past things nor future things. There are:
1) Present of things past (memory)
2) Present of things present
3) Present of things future (expectation)

The past is measured as it passes. It is measurable because it has space. But there is no space for the present to be measured.

Time is not the motion of a body.

"We, therefore, measure neither future times, nor past, nor present, nor those passing by's and yet we do measure times" (Jones, 90).

Time is measured in one's mind.

God knows all things, past, present and future because he can measure all time in His mind.

Augustine's style is characteristically ambivalent to reason. He implores God's help along the way.

Augustine's conception of time:
1) Time flows
2) Time is a continuum
3) Past, present and future are somehow coexistent in individual minds.
4) There are three aspects of time:
a) present past (memory)
b) present present (experience)
c) present future (expectation)

The relation of time as man's conception to God's conception is this: man can hold in his mind the conception of time in the three aspects. He holds a finite amount of present past, present present, and present future. God holds in his mind all present pasts, present presents, and present futures. His infinite knowledge of time (and the events occurring in them) makes time irrelevant to God. Everything is now for God.

Augustine disliked the notion of infinity and thus developed his fine scheme. The inability to rationally fathom infinitude drew Augustine to believe God's mysterious nature is infinite.

Augustine's philosophy still suffers from its basis of mysticism. Mystic philosophy relies on the source of a few exclusive experiences. When philosophy rests on private knowledge like this it abandons its claim to rational inquiry.

God-Reality is All-God

God's all-good. This is another Platonic ideal that Augustine interpreted through Christianity.

To exist is good, and that the most real thing will be most good seemed to be a maxim or self-evident truth to Augustine.

Augustine was not content to say reality is good for man; he added that reality is good to man.

Providence, Evil and Free Will

Providence played a key role in Augustine. His emphasis on providence reflects the sense of uncertainty and insecurity men felt in his age.

Providence gave Augustine the security he sought.

God was identified with ultimate reality. Ultimate reality was identified with ultimate goodness. Evil was therefore a privation of ultimate goodness. It was a deficiency.

Evil, while starting from the Neoplatonist point of view, became a result from a deficiency in us.

The account of evil Augustine gives is advantageous, but it is philosophically unsatisfactory because:
1) It rests on an appeal to ignorance: "If we but knew enough, we would see that everything is really all right" (Jones, 97)
2) The Good is immutable. Evil is therefore mutability. But this makes change evil and how can change (like Augustine's conversion) be evil?

Augustine created a problem between foreknowledge and free will. If God has foreknowledge than man has no free will.

Augustine can be criticized for his account of providence on two reasons:
1) "The fact that God knows everything that is going to happen means that man is not free to choose what he does" (Jones, 99). Augustine's response was that God knows not everything that will happen, but he knows everything that is happening because He is an atemporal being. He sees past, present and future at the present.
2) "The fact that God does everything means that man does nothing" (Jones, 99). Augustine argued that God chooses to work through human wills.

Augustine's account of providence creates a problem of man's responsibility. If God does everything, man does nothing and thus cannot be held responsible.

The Basic Conflict in Augustine's Account of God

Augustine fought against the anthropomorphism of naive Christianity, but in doing so he lost much of the Christian concept of God.

His attempt to reconcile the personal God of primitive Christianity with the ultimate reality of Greek metaphysics failed.

While Augustine failed, he was on a good track. "Aquinas, for instance, showed far greater skill than Augustine in giving rational interpretation to the basic religious insights he and Augustine shared" (Jones, 101).