Paying Attention To The Sky

St. Augustine

The following is a reading selection from Samuel Enoch Stumpf’s classic history of philosophy, Socrates to Sartre. The chapter on Augustine has a pithy overview of St. Augustine’s life. I offer it as a companion piece to yesterday’s reading selections from Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo.

“St. Augustine’s intense concern over his personal destiny provided the driving force for his philosophic activity. From his early youth, he suffered from a deep moral turmoil, which drove him to a life-long quest for true wisdom and spiritual peace. He was born in Tagaste in the African province of Numidia in 354 AD. His father was a pagan, but his mother, Monica, was a devout Christian. At the age of sixteen, Augustine began the study of rhetoric in Carthage, a port city given to licentious ways. Though his mother had instilled in him the ways of Christian thought and behavior, he threw off this religious faith and morality, taking at this time a mistress by whom he had a son and with whom he lived for a decade. At the same time, his thirst for knowledge impelled his extremely able mind to rigorous study, and he became a successful student of rhetoric.

A series of personal experiences led him to his unique approach to philoso­phy. He was nineteen years old when he read the Hortensius of Cicero, which was an exhortation to achieve philosophical wisdom. These words of Cicero kin­dled his passion for learning, but he was left with the problem of where to find intellectual certainty. His Christian ideas seemed unsatisfactory to him. He was particularly perplexed by the ever-present problem of moral evil. How can one explain the existence of evil in human experience? The Christians had said that God is the creator of all things and also that God is good. How, then, is it possible for evil to arise out of a world that a perfectly good God had created?

Because Augustine could find no answer in the Christianity he learned as a youth, he turned to a group called the Manicheans, who were sympathetic to much of Christianity but who, boasting of their intellectual superiority, rejected the basic monotheism of the Old Testament and with it the doctrine that the Creator and Redeemer of man are one and the same. Instead, the Manichaean’s taught a doctrine of dualism, according to which there were two basic principles in the universe, the principle of light or goodness, on the one hand, and the principle of darkness or evil, on the other. These two principles were held to be equally eternal and were seen as eternally in conflict with each other. This conflict was reflected in human life in the conflict between the soul, composed of light, and the body, composed of darkness. At first this theory of dualism seemed to provide the answer to the problem of evil; it overcame the contradiction between the presence of evil in a world created by a good God. Augustine could now attribute his sensual desires to the external power of darkness.

Although this dualism seemed to solve the contradiction of evil in a God-created world, it raised new problems. For one thing, how could one explain why there are two conflicting principles in nature? If no convincing reason could be given, is intellectual certi­tude possible? Far more serious was his awareness that it did not help to solve his moral turmoil to say that it was all engendered by some external force. The presence of fierce passion was no less unsettling just because the “blame” for it had been shifted to something outside of himself, What had originally attracted him to the Manichaeans was their boast that they could provide him with truth that could be discussed and made plain, not requiring, as the Christians did, “faith before reason.”

He therefore broke with the Manicheans, feeling that “those philosophers whom they call Academics [Skeptics] were wiser than the rest in thinking that we ought to doubt everything, and that no truth can be comprehended by man.” He was now attracted to Skepticism, though at the same time he retained some belief in God. He maintained a materialistic view of things and on this account doubted the existence of immaterial substances and the immortality of the soul.

Hoping for a more effective career in rhetoric, Augustine left Africa for Rome and shortly thereafter moved to Milan, where he became municipal profes­sor of rhetoric in 384. Here he was profoundly influenced by Ambrose, who was then Bishop of Milan. From Ambrose Augustine derived not so much the tech­niques of rhetoric, but somewhat unexpectedly a greater appreciation of Chris­tianity. While in Milan, Augustine took another mistress, having left his first one in Africa. It was here also that Augustine came upon certain forms of Platonism, especially the Neo-Platonism found in the Enneads of Plotinus.

There was much in Neo-Platonism that caught his imagination, particularly the conception of an immaterial world totally separate from the material world and the belief that man possesses a spiritual sense that enables him to know God and the immaterial world. Moreover, from Plotinus Augustine derived the conception that evil is not a positive reality but is rather a matter of privation, the absence of good. Above all, Neoplatonism overcame Augustine’s former skepticism, materialism, and du­alism. Through Platonic thought he was able to understand that not all activity is physical, that there is a spiritual as well as a physical reality. He could now see the unity of the world without having to assume the existence of two principles behind soul and body, for Plotinus had presented the picture of reality as a single graduated system in which matter is simply on a lower level.

Intellectually, Neo-Platonism provided what Augustine had been looking for, but it left his moral problem still unsolved. What he needed now was moral strength to match his intellectual insight. This he found by way of Ambrose’s sermons. Neoplatonism had finally made Christianity reasonable to him, and now he was also able to exercise the act of faith and thereby derive the power of the spirit without feeling that he was lapsing into some form of superstition. His dramatic conversion occurred in 386, when he gave “real assent” to abandoning his profession of rhetoric and giving his life totally to the pursuit of philosophy, which, for him, also meant the knowledge of God. He now saw Platonism and Christianity as virtually one, seeing in Neoplatonism the philosophical expression of Christianity, saying that “I am confident that among the Platonists I shall find what is not opposed to the teachings of our religion.” He therefore set out on what he called “my whole program” of achieving wisdom, saying that “from this moment forward, it is my resolve never to depart from the authority of Christ, for I find none that is stronger.” Still, he emphasized that “I must follow after this with the greatest subtlety of reason.”

For Augustine, true philosophy was inconceivable without a confluence of faith and reason. To him, wisdom was Christian wisdom. Reason without revela­tion was certainly possible, but it would never be complete. This was true partic­ularly for Augustine, since he came to believe that there is no such thing as a purely natural man without some ultimate spiritual destiny. Consequently, to understand the concrete condition of man, he must be considered from the point of view of the Christian faith, and this in turn requires that the whole world be considered from the vantage point of faith. There could be, for Augustine, no distinction between theology and philosophy. Indeed, he believed that one could not properly philosophize until his will was transformed, that clear thinking was possible only under the influence of God’s grace. In this way, Augustine set the dominant mood and style of Christian wisdom of the Middle Ages, although Aquinas in the thirteenth century altered some of its assumptions.

It is therefore not possible to discuss Augustine’s philosophy without at the same time considering his theological viewpoint. Indeed, Augustine wrote no purely philosophical works in the contemporary sense of that term. He was an incredibly prolific writer, and as he became a noted leader in the Catholic Church, he was inevitably involved in writing as a protagonist of the faith and a defender against heresy. In 396 he became Bishop of Hippo, the seaport near his native town of Tagaste. Among his many opponents was Pelagius, with whom he entered into a celebrated controversy. Pelagius had taught that all men possess the natural ability to achieve a righteous life, thereby denying the doctrine of original sin. This led, according to Augustine, to misunderstanding the true na­ture of man by assuming that man’s will is of itself capable of achieving his salvation and thereby minimizing the function of God’s grace.

This controversy illuminates Augustine’s mode of thought perfectly, for it indicates again his insis­tence that all knowledge upon all subjects must take into account the revealed truth of Scripture along with the insights of philosophy. Since all knowledge aimed at helping man understand God, this religious dimension had clearly a priority in his reflections, As Aquinas said about him later, “Whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrine of the Platonists, found in their writings anything consistent with the faith, he adopted it; and whatever he found con­trary to the faith he amended.” Still it was Platonism that had rescued Augustine from skepticism, made the Christian faith reasonable and, indeed, powerful for him, and set off one of the great literary achievements in theology and phi­losophy. As if to symbolize his tempestuous life, Augustine died in 430 at the age of seventy-five in the posture of reciting the Penitential Psalms as the Vandals besieged Hippo.”

Psalm of Repentance (Psalm 51) Augustine Read Awaiting His Death
Have pity on me, God,
Pity to match the greatness of your mercy
And the multitude of your kindnesses:
Erase my wickedness.

For I know my wickedness
And my sin stares me ever in the face.

I was conceived in wickedness
And in sin my mother conceived me.

You have loved the truth
And you have revealed to me the unknown
And hidden sides of your wisdom

God will not turn away a worn and humbled heart.
From Augustine by James J. O’Donnell