Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
Aurelius Augustinus was born in Tagaste, Northern Africa, in 353, of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica, who exercised a profound influence on her son. He became a teacher of rhetoric, first in his native city, later at Milan (384-386), and devoted himself to the study of theological and philosophical questions, which carried him from Manichaeism to skepticism, and left him unsatisfied. In 386 he began to read some of the writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists, which gave stability to his thought, and came under the influence of the eloquent Bishop Ambrose of Milan, whose sermons touched his heart. After his conversion in 387 he returned to Tagaste, where he lived for three years (388-391) according to monastic rules, and wai ordained to the priesthood. In 396 he was raised to the bishopric Hippo, in Africa, which he held until his death in 430.
For Augustine the defining moment of his life was the time of his religious conversion to an intense and highly individual form of Christianity. He dated this experience to his time in Milan, and in relation to this he explained his ensuing career. But contemporaries found it odd to single out that particular moment—when he was conveniently away from Africa and from any scrutiny of his motives and actions—in a life that was not always as he seemed to narrate it. None of the handful of Augustine’s contemporaries known to have read the Confessions was persuaded by its narrative of youthful dissipation turned to austere maturity. Augustine was always dutiful and restrained.
Augustine is remarkable and extraordinary for what he wrote , displaying the strength and sharpness of his mind. . His distinctive theological style shaped Latin Christianity in a way surpassed only by scripture itself. His work continues to hold contemporary relevance, in part because of his membership in a religious group that was dominant in the West in his time and remains so today.
Pelagius, a monk, came to Rome, in the year 400, with a doctrine opposed to the notion of original sin: God is a good and just God, and everything created by him good; hence, human nature cannot be radically evil. Adam was free to sin or not to sin ; his sensuous nature, which is evil, determined him, and he chose sin. Sin, however, cannot be transmitted from generation to generation, because every man has free will : sin implies freedom. Freedom is the original act of grace, the first gift bestowed by a good God; hence, man needs no help, he can resist sin and will the good. And yet, the example of Adam’s sin was baneful; the imitation of his bad example has led to a habit, which it is difficult to overcome, and which is responsible for man’s fall. But, the churchman asked: If man is not enslaved by sin, if his freedom of choice has not been destroyed, what part can divine grace and the Christian religion play in his redemption? The Pelagians answer: It is by an act of divine grace that knowledge is revealed (in Scripture, in the teachings and example of Jesus, and in the doctrines of the Church) which will lend support to the human will in choosing the good. Baptism and faith in Jesus Christ are necessary to admission into the kingdom of heaven. God, being omniscient, knows exactly what choices men are going to make in their lives, how they will use their power of freedom, and determines beforehand the rewards and punishments to be meted out (predestination).
The Pelagian teaching is opposed by Augustine, the greatest constructive thinker and the most influential teacher of the early Christian Church. In his system the most important theological and philosophical problems of his age are discussed, and a Christian world-view developed which represents the culmination of Patristic thought and becomes the guide of Christian philosophy for centuries to come. It is owing to the significance of Augustine ‘s views for medieval philosophy, as well as for the Christian theology of the Reformation and the modern period, that we shall consider his system in its different phases.
Intellectually, Augustine represents the most influential adaptation of the ancient Platonic tradition with Christian ideas that ever occurred in the Latin Christian world. Augustine received the Platonic past in a far more limited and diluted way than did many of his Greek-speaking contemporaries, but his writings were so widely read and imitated throughout Latin Christendom that his particular synthesis of Christian, Roman, and Platonic traditions defined the terms for much later tradition and debate.
It has been thought that Augustine’s anti-Pelagian teaching grew out of his conception of the Church and its sacraments as a means of salvation; and attention was called to the fact that before the Pelagian controversy this aspect of the Church had, through the struggle with the Donatists, assumed special importance in his mind. But this conception should be denied. It is quite true that in 395 Augustine’s views on sin and grace, freedom and predestination, were not what they afterward came to be. But the new trend was given to them before the time of his anti-Donatist activity, and so before he could have heard anything of Pelagius. What we call Augustinianism was not a reaction against Pelagianism; it would be much truer to say that the latter was a reaction against Augustine’s views.
Religion for Augustine, was never merely a matter of the intellect. The seventh book of the Confessions recounts a perfectly satisfactory intellectual conversion, but the extraordinary eighth book takes him one necessary step further. Augustine could not bring himself to seek the ritual purity of baptism without cleansing himself of the desires of the flesh to an extreme degree. For him, baptism required renunciation of sexuality in all its express manifestations. The narrative of the Confessions shows Augustine forming the will to renounce sexuality through a reading of the letters of Paul. The decisive scene occurs in a garden in Milan, where a child’s voice seems to bid Augustine to “take up and read,” whereupon he finds in Paul’s writings the inspiration to adopt a life of chastity.
St. Augustine groundbreaking philosophy infused Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism. He is famous for being an inimitable Catholic theologian and for his agnostic contributions to Western philosophy. Characteristic of the spirit of the entire Christian age is the Augustinian view that the only knowledge worth having is tin knowledge of God and self. All the other sciences, metaphysics, and ethics, have value only so far as they tell us of God. It is our duty to understand what we firmly believe, to see the rationality of our faith. ” Understand in order that you may believe, believe ii order that you may understand. Some things we do not believe unless we understand them; others we do not understand unless we believe.” Besides natural knowledge, faith in divine revelation is a source of knowledge of God. Intelligence needed for understanding what it believes; faith for believing what it understands. Reason, to be sure, must first decide whether a revelation has actually taken place. When faith has comprehended the revelation, reason seeks to understand and explain it. We cannot, however, understand everything we believe, but must accept the truths of faith on the authority of the Church, which is the representative of God on earth.
We know that we exist; our thinking and existence are in- dubitable certainties. And we know that there is eternal and immutable truth: our very doubts prove that we are conscious of truth, and the fact that we call a judgment true or false points to the existence of a world of truth. Augustine here conceives truth, after the Platonic fashion, as having real existence, and the human mind as possessing instinctive knowledge of it. Sometimes he speaks as if we envisaged the divine ideas. at other times he says that God creates them in us. In either case, truth is objective, not a mere subjective product of the human” mind; there is something independent and compelling about it; whether you or I have it or not, it is and always will be. The source of this eternal and changeless world of truth is God; indeed, the divine mind is the abode of the Platonic world of ideas, forms, archetypes, or essences, even of the ideal of particular things.
The most widespread and longest-lasting theological controversies of the 4th century focused on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity—that is, the three-ness of God represented in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Augustine’s Africa had been left out of much of the fray, and most of what was written on the subject was in Greek, a language Augustine barely knew and had little access to. But he was keenly aware of the prestige and importance of the topic . Augustine is carefully orthodox, after the spirit of his and succeeding times, but adds his own emphasis in the way he teaches the resemblance between God and man: the three-ness of God he finds reflected in a galaxy of similar triples in the human soul, and he sees there both food for meditation and deep reason for optimism about the ultimate human condition.
The impelling motive in Augustine’s theology is the Neoplatonic conception of the absoluteness and majesty of God and the insignificance of his creatures, considered apart from him. God is an eternal, transcendent being, all-powerful, all-good, all- wise; absolute unity, absolute intelligence, and absolute will; that is, absolute spirit. He is absolutely free, but his decisions are as unchangeable as his nature ; he is absolutely holy and cannot will evil. In him willing and doing are one: what he wills is done without the help of any intermediate being or Logos. In him are all ideas or forms of things ; which means that he proceeded rationally in creating the world and that everything owes its form to him. Augustine accepts the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity, although the illustrations which he uses to make it clear are tainted with Sabellianism.
God created the world out of nothing; it is not a necessary evolution of his own being, as the pantheistic Neoplatonists hold, for this transcends the nature of his creatures. His creation is a continuous creation (creatio continua), for otherwise the world would go to pieces : it is absolutely dependent on him. We cannot say that the world was created in time or in space, for. before God created the world there was neither time nor space; in creating, he created time and space; he himself is timeless .and without space. Yet, God’s creation is not an eternal creation ; the world has a beginning ; creatures are finite, change- able and perishable. God also created matter it is not earlier form, though prior to it in nature, that is, we have to presuppose matter logically as the basis of the form. Since God is omnipotent, every conceivable thing, even the most insignificant, must be present in the universe.
In order to prove divine omnipotence, Augustine is driven to the position that God is the cause of everything. In order to prove his goodness, it is necessary to exclude evil from the world or explain it away. Creation is a revelation of God’s goodness; he created the universe on account of his infinite love. (But, Augustine hastens to add, for fear of depriving the Deity of absolute power, he was not bound to create, his love did not compel him ; it was an act of his free will. ) Every kind of existence is, therefore, in a sense, good ; only we should not judge its value from the standpoint of human utility. If God has created and predetermined everything and is at the same time an absolutely good being, he has willed everything for the best of his creatures, and even evil must be good in its way. Like the shadows in a picture, it belongs to the beauty of the whole ; evil is not good, black is not white, but it is good that evil is. Or, it is conceived as a defect, as privation of essence , as an omission of the good; in this sense, if there were no good, there could be no evil. Good is possible without evil, but evil is not possible without the good; for everything is good, at least so far as it has any being at all. Privation of good is evil because it means an absence of something nature ought to have. Nor can moral evil mar the beauty of universal creation. Moral evil springs from the will of man or fallen angels ; it is the result of an evil will,- which, however, is nothing positive; hence, it merely represents a defective will; it, too, is privation of good .The worst evil is the turning away from God, or the highest good, to the perishable world. God could have omitted evil from the scheme of things, but he preferred to use it as a means of serving the good; the glory of the universe is enhanced by its presence (optimism). He foresaw, for example, that man would turn from the good to sin; he permitted it and predetermined his punishment. That is, in order to save God’s goodness along with his omnipotence, Augustine;
(1) denies the existence of real evil or makes it relative;
(2) defines it as a privation of the good;
(3) shifts the responsibility for it to man.
Man, the highest creature in the visible world, is a union of soul and body. This union is not the result of sin ; the body is not the prison-house of the soul, and evil. The soul is a simple immaterial or spiritual substance, entirely distinct in essence from the body; it is the directing and forming principle, the life of the body ; but how it acts on the body is a mystery. Sensation is a mental, not a physical process. Sense-perception, imagination, and sensuous desire are functions of the sensitive or inferior soul ; memory, intellect, and will, of the intellectual or superior soul or spirit, which is in no wise dependent on the body. All these functions, how- ever, are functions of one soul : the soul is a unity, three in one, the image of the triune God. Since the will is present in all modifications of the soul, we may say that these are nothing but wills.
The soul is not an emanation from God; each man has his own individual soul. Nor did souls exist before their union with bodies (pre-existence). How they arose, Augustine leaves unsettled; it is a problem he is unable to solve. He finds it hard to decide in favor of any of the views common in his day : that God creates a new soul for every child that is born (creationism) or that souls are generated from the souls of parents in the same way, and at the same time, as bodies from bodies .
Although the soul has a beginning in time, it does not die. Augustine proves its immortality by the usual arguments of his age, which go back to Plato. Still, although the soul is im- mortal in the sense of continuing to exist, it is not necessarily immortal in the sense of realizing eternal blessedness. The eternal blessedness of the soul in God cannot be demonstrated: our hope in it is an act of faith. goal for a union with God, that is, a religious, mystical ideal : the vision of God. Such a union cannot take place in an imperfect world, but only in a future life, which is the true life. Our earthly life is but a pilgrimage to God; in comparison with eternal blessedness, it is not life, but death. We have here the characteristic pessimism of early Christianity with respect to the visible universe, and buoyant optimism so far as the hereafter is concerned : contemptus mundi on the one hand, and amor Dei on the other. The dualism between the good God and the evil world, however, Augustine seeks to reconcile by his theory of evil, which we have already considered and according to which there is no absolute evil. The way is also shown by which the ethical dualism between the highest good and our workaday morality may be bridged.
By love we are united with God, the highest good j hence love is the supreme virtue, the source of all the other virtues: of temperance or self-control, which is love of God as opposed to love of the world; of fortitude, which overcomes pain and suffering by love; of justice, which is the service of God; and of wisdom, which is the power of right choice. Love of God is the basis of true love of self and of others. It is the love of God alone that makes the so-called pagan virtues genuine virtues; unless inspired and prompted by this love, they are nothing but ” splendid vices.”
The love of God is the work of divine grace acting within: a mystical process taking place in the sacraments of the Church under the influence of God’s power. Faith, hope, and charity are the three stages in moral conversion, love being the highest. ” Whoever loves right, doubtless also believes and hopes right.” ” Without love faith can do nothing; nor is love without hope, nor hope without love, nor either without faith.”
In this teaching lies the possibility of a more positive attitude toward earthly life and human institutions than seemed possible under the ideals of primitive Christianity. The early Christians had assumed a negative attitude toward human institutions: marriage, the affairs of State, war, the administration of justice, commercial pursuits, and so on. But with the development of an organized Church and the Christianization of the Roman Empire, a change became necessary: the immediate result of this change was a kind of oscillation between world-denial and world-affirmation. We find it in Augustine: he wavers between the ascetic ideal and the worldly ideal. His attitude is the characteristic attitude of medieval moralists. Thus, he recognizes the right of property; he does not agree with the old Fathers that property is based on injustice, that all have an equal right to property, that wealth is a ” damnable usurpation ” (Ambrose). He also regards rich and poor alike as capable of salvation. Nevertheless, he looks upon the possession of private property as a hindrance to the soul, and places a higher value upon poverty. Let us, therefore, abstain from the possession of private property, he says, or if we cannot do that, let us abstain from the love of possession. The same dualism confronts us in the estimate of marriage and virginity: marriage is conceived as a sacrament, and yet the unmarried state is the highest.
His conception of the State reveals the same thing. The earthly State is based on self-love and even contempt of God; the City of God, on love of God and contempt of self. Nevertheless, the temporal State is an ethical com- munity with the mission to promote earthly happiness, and justice reigns in it. But its goal is relative, while that of the Church is absolute ; hence, the State is subordinate to the Church ; the authority of the Church is infallible, it is the visible appearance of the kingdom of God.
In short, we find in Augustine a twofold ideal. The highest good or perfection is a transcendent good,, which even the Chris- tian is unable to realize in the flesh, being still under the sway of carnal concupiscence : consequently, his perfection consists in love of God, in the good will. A certain degree of perfection, however, a kind of holiness, may be reached by the performance of certain external works: venial sins may be wiped out by prayer, fasting, alms. Yet the supreme and true goal is, after all, renunciation of the world 3 withdrawal from social life, asceticism, imitation of Christ. The monastic life remains, for Augustine, the Christian ideal.
The leading trait of this ethical teaching is its idealism. The greatest thing in the universe is not the material aspect of existence, but spirit ; the greatest thing in man is not body, not his sensuous-impulsive nature, not the satisfaction of appetite, but spirit*
Augustine opposes the Pelagian theory of the will. Man was, indeed, free to sin or not to sin in Adam ; God not only created him free, but also endowed him with supernatural gifts of grace : immortality, holiness, justice, freedom from rebellious desire. But Adam chose to disobey God and thereby not only lost the divine gifts, but corrupted the entire human race, ” The first man transmitted his sinful nature, and the punishment necessarily connected with it, to his offspring, for he represented the whole human race. And now it is impossible for man not to sin (nan posse non peccare) : he went into sin free and came out of it unfree. Adam’s sin is not merely the beginning and example of sin, it is original, hereditary sin. The result of it all is that the entire human race stands condemned, and no one will be saved from merited punishment except by the mercy and unmerited grace of God.
God alone can reform corrupted man. He does not select the recipients of his grace according to their good works, indeed, the works of sinful man cannot be good in the true sense of the term, only those whom God has elected as marks of his grace can perform good works: ” the human will does not achieve grace by an act of freedom, but rather achieves freedom by grace.” That is, God can bring about such a change in the human soul as will give it the love of the good which it possessed before Adam fell. The knowledge and love of the highest good, or God, restores to man the power to do good works, the power to turn away from the life of sense to God : in other words, the power of freedom, the will to emancipate himself from the flesh. Freedom means love of the good; that is, only the good will is free.
The thought underlying this teaching is that unless a man has a notion of the good, unless he knows what is truly good and loves it, he is lost. Some men have the good will, others are without it. Augustine’s problem is to account for its appearance in some persons and not in others, and he explains it as a free gift of God.
Why God should have chosen some for eternal happiness and others for eternal punishment is a mystery; but there is no injustice in his choice, since man has forfeited any claim he may have had to salvation. Yet, is not predestination identical with fatalism ; does it not mean that God has determined before hand who shall be saved and who destroyed, and that his choice is purely arbitrary ? Predestination is the eternal resolve of God to lead this or that man to eternal life by the infallible means of grace. Predestination implies foreknowledge of his choice. But that has nothing to do with the man’s freedom, Augustine thinks: he was free to choose eternal life, he did not choose it; God knew that he would not, and has decided beforehand whom to save. Here, again, we have an example of Augustine’s conception of the absolute power of God; he is unwilling to limit divine freedom in the slightest degree : God can do as he pleases with man, and he has settled from all eternity what is going to happen to every individual. Man has had his chance in Adam; he abused the privilege, and God knew he would abuse it; but he was under no compulsion to go wrong and he has no right to complain if he is not among the elect. Nevertheless, if he truly loves God, if he has the holy will, he is redeemed.
Those whom God has chosen for redemption constitute the City of God, and those who are chosen for destruction form the city of this world, the kingdom of evil. Human history represents a struggle between the two kingdoms, the last stage of which is the period inaugurated by Christ, through whom divine grace is bestowed. The kingdom of God reaches its perfection in the Christian Church: it is the kingdom of God on earth. No one can be saved outside of the Church, although not every one in it will be saved. Who is to be saved, no one knows. The battle between the forces of good and evil will end in the victory of the righteous; then will follow the great Sabbath, in which the members of the City of God will enjoy eternal blessedness, while the children of evil will suffer eternal punish- ment in the eternal fire together with the devil.
Augustine’s impact on the Middle Ages cannot be overestimated. Thousands of manuscripts survive, and many serious medieval libraries—possessing no more than a few hundred books in all—had more works of Augustine than of any other writer. His achievement is paradoxical inasmuch as—like a modern artist who makes more money posthumously than in life—most of it was gained after his death and in lands and societies far removed from his own.