(Originally written November 17, 2006 in Book 11)
Augustine's ethics
Augustine's ethics have a negative tone.
Augustine saw the good life being attainable only as a gift from God.
He believed it was much easier to do wrong rather than right.
Augustine's asceticism was moderate compared to his contemporaries, but severe by modern standards.
Augustine agreed with the Platonic notion that the wise man is cultivated in a society.
He had little to say about social ethics other than we ought to help one another as much as we can.
Augustine advocated for a strong law and strong ruler because it is better than the alternative: civil war.
Revolting against a leader is revolting against God.
Slavery was viewed as an evil, but agitating for its abolition was wrong because it was instituted by God as a punishment for sins.
To improve or altar existing social arrangements is to imply we are not content with God's program for us.
The evils we suffer are either goods in disguise or well-deserved punishments.
The delights and pains of the flesh are inconsequential as compared to the delights and pains of the soul.
Ethical value lay in motive rather than accomplishment for Augustine.
Augustine and Aristotle treated incontinence in similar manners, but for different reasons.
1) Where Aristotle disliked incontinence because it demeaned man, Augustine disliked it because it was disobedience to God.
2) Aristotle relieved men of responsibility when temptation became too great to overcome. Augustine held men accountable for their actions regardless of their temptation.
3) Augustine would have regarded many thing Aristotle held to be continent as incontinent
Augustine saw men as being incontinent frequently and paradoxically blamable
Everything except love for God was a snare and a delusion.
Augustine believed that living morally will not significantly help us, but living immorally will damn man.
The good for Augustine was a reunion with God. A separation occurred between man and God as a result of Adam's sin.
The way back to God was through faith in Jesus, "Through religion, that is not through ethics, which is first and foremost concerned with behavior in this world" (Jones, 119).
The Drama of Salvation
Each man is an actor who plays a small role in the big production of God's drama.
Sinful desires are incredibly difficult to eradicate, especially pride. Even when men overcome pride and are humble they take pride in their humility.
No one is certain of salvation. Even those who have been saved by divine intervention came are not freed from the temptations of the flesh.
Relapse for the saved is possible at all times. Therefore, complacency is an acute danger.
Life is desperately hazardous. The past is due to anyone's future.
The Mechanics of Salvation
To whom was Christ praying when he died for man's sins?
If it was God the Father, then God has a divided will, which is absurd. It can't be Satan because God doesn't owe him anything.
Augustine began with traditional Biblical language but began reinterpret it.
The Son became man to prove that flesh is not evil.
The Son died to show that death, though a punishment for sin, is not itself a sin.
Christ's death shows us how we ought to die - in piety, humility and peace.
God sending His Son shows us His great love for us better than anything else could.
The Play within a play
The passion is a play-within-a-play designed to invoke emotions in the other players of the large play. Man's egoism has often prevented Him from seeing just how much love God has shown us.
God cod could have redeemed man via divine fiat (as He created the world) but for mysterious reasons chose this way instead.
Augustine's notion of redemption is much more enlightened than the primitive notion of bloody sacrifice.
Augustine faces problems like if God is all then man is nothing. "No man is rightly saved by the assistance of divine aid" is an inadequate formula.
An arguing against the Manichaeism and Pelagians he used Pelagian arguments to refute Manichaeism. He used the arguments of Manichaeism to refute Plagiarism. The Pelagians were acute enough to point this out.
Linehan: Jones' characterization of Augustine is pretty awful. Even Russell give him more of a fair treatment. Jones is atrociously guilty of the fallacy of equivocation, especially in regards to the Doctrine of redemption.
The world is actually a puppet theater. God writes the parts and pulls the strings. Why would God write and perform a play for himself? Why go to the trouble of the play if God knows who will be saved and who will be damned?
Another problem for Augustine is that God arbitrarily chooses who will be saved.
Augustine's conception of justice was much different than modern men's conception of justice. Modern man sees it as unjust that we should inherit Adam's sin. "It seems unfair that Adam, who might just as well have been created with fewer deficiencies should be blamed for what, given his nature, was bound to happen. It seems unfair... that some few of us should be arbitrarily pulled out of the common cesspool of iniquity" (Jones, 124).
Augustine's doctrine of predestination is immoral and impracticable.
Augustine could not live up to the doctrine of predestination because otherwise he would not have advocated for us to pray, to do good, to fast, to struggle against temptation, or to do anything because whether or not we do anything is irrelevant to whether or not we are to be saved.
Augustine's life leading up to his conversion was irrelevant because his conversion was directly induced by God. At the moment of conversion he stood in an immediate relation to the Deity.
Augustine's interpretation of salvation is unacceptable in ecclesiastical terms because the Church in the exclusive agency through which souls are saved. The Church is the mediator between God and Man.
Augustine had a problem because he saw salvation in both mystical and ecclesiastical terms.
The Donatism Heresy
Augustine faced this problem when he went to Hippo in 391.
Donatism was a vigorous rival to the Church at this time.
Donatism was a peculiar heresy because it did not differ from the Church in doctrine.
Donatists believed that the sacraments were ineffective if performed by unworthy priests.
While this may seem plausible and harmless the Church saw it as a danger to their institution.
The Church had to maintain that the worth of the sacraments came from God and the Church, not from the administering priests.
Augustine first tried to reason with the Donatists. He believed the truth would prevail over heresy. When this failed Augustine elicited help from imperial authorities. This was easy because in addition to being heretics, the Donatists were social radicals.
Through persecution the Donatists lost their grip on N. Africa and Catholic Christianity held it for one more century (only to lose it to Islam).
While this may seem inhumane, Augustine advocated it because it turned many back to the Catholic faith. This ideal paved the way for the Inquisition.
Augustine did not recognize the primacy of the Pope because he held no man to be infallible.
Augustine saw the final authority of Christ as a general council.
Augustine held that we ought to use reason to discover truth as best we can, remembering that God would not have given us reason if we weren't to use it, but to remember that if we believe reason to be the ultimate source of truth we will be damned by our pride.
Augustine held a belief that man, in a general use of the word could slowly but steadily increase his grasp of truth through corrections of councils and doctrine. But no council or doctrine could ever arrive at the ultimate truth.
Augustine's view of the sacraments:
The earthly city had a dual meaning:
1) hell
2) the pilgrimage of this life
The City of God had a duel meaning:
1) Heaven
2) The Church
The visible Church is the embodiment the invisible church.
The Church and its members are the body of Christ. It owes its allegiance and life to Jesus.
The City of God was a very complex structure.
The synthesis of Augustine's two conceptions of man's relationship to God (ecclesiastical through the Church and its rites and the mystical conversion) is difficult and problematic. In the mysticism and predestinarianism synthesis God and man are privately united and the City of God is a mere aggregate of private relations. In the ecclesiastical version the Church and its sacraments were the key to salvation and private salvation was danger to the authority of the Church.
Nature and Natural Science
The physical world was the stage on which the drama of salvation unfold.
Augustine's Disinterest in science
Augustine was basically disinterested in science and the physical world.
He lacked the curiosity of the Greeks and the moderns. Curiosity was replaced by the fear of intellectual pride.
He did not have the incentive of happiness in this world that Greek and the moderns have.
His otherworldliness made him indifferent to ethics, politics and physical interests.
Nature was dominated by a naive teleology in Augustine.
Man, thought nothing in respect to God, was the center of the physical universe. Man is the end or purpose for which the universe was created.
"Augustine's teleology was so naively anthropocentric that it ws impossible for him to reach an unbiased conclusion" (Jones, 130).
Uncritical of the marvelous
Augustine's disposition made him very open to miracles.
Modern man looks at miracles and see them not as miracles, but as challenges.
Other reasons for Augustine's unscientific approach
Augustine's ingenuity achieved an incredibly synthesis between the Scriptures and his personal beliefs. It was a correspondence between two conceptual systems, not a conceptual system and reality.
Augustine held that whatever was to be known about the physical world was easily discovered and what was not easily discovered was purposely hidden by God.
Belief in the regularity of nature
Since everything is caused by God, everything is, in sense, a miracle.
Unusual things only appear more miraculous.
Augustine believed in a uniformity or regularity in nature and that unusual things were only unusual in our minds. This line of thinking paved the way for science to have a good argument for the regularity of nature.
History
The history of humanity was to serve as instruction for future acts of man.
Prior to Jesus' life, God gave signs to man to point them to Him. The history of the Jews was a sign.
Teleological Bias
Augustine's account of history was dominated by a teleology that was anthropocentric.
Augustine and the Greek Historians
Herodotus and Thucydides (the greatest Greek Historians) were far more scientific than Augustine. But, in some respects were much more narrow than Augustine.
The Greeks were dominated by current events. Their historians also attributed a lot to chance and accident. Augustine held that nothing happened by chance. His historical conversion "may be worthless" but his notion of unity and purpose in everything is key to historians today.
Augustine held that Jesus' life was the turning point of history. Everything leading up to it was actually leading up to it and everything after it was designed to supplement it.
While most people do not see divine providence in action, the teleological approach is necessary in historian work today.
Augustine's focus on universal history vs. the provincial focus of the Greek was a vast improvement over the Greeks.
Conclusion
Augustine does not evoke a neutral response.
Most people see Augustine as hopelessly unbalanced - "a neurotic exaggeration of guilt and sin and an unhealthy otherworldliness that results in almost total neglect of the really serious social and political problems that it is the business of the philosopher to discuss" (Jones, 136).
Augustine's mystical experience is viewed as a sign of psychic instability.
Others will see modern times as going too far in the other direction. Even those who do not accept Augustine's Christianity see his picture of human nature as better and more accurate than the 18th and 19th century philosophers.
Linehan - It is a bit sickening to read a trashing misrepresentative account of Augustine. And though Jones pays some respect to him in a few final paragraphs it was atrocious to read.
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