Augustine

Augustine
November 13, 354–August 28, 430

Augustine was born in the province of Numidia, North Africa.  He received part of his education in Madaura and Carthage where he be­came familiar with philosophy and Christianity.  He traveled to Rome several times before re­turning to Africa in 391 and being chosen pres­byter of the church of Hippo Regius where he presided for thirty-eight years, until his death.  During this period he was both the physi­cal and intellectual leader of the North African and entire Western church.

Schaff makes the following statements concern­ing Au­gustine:

Augustine, the man with upturned eye, with pen in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is usually rep­resented), is a philosophi­cal and theological ge­nius of the first order (emphasis mine), towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeed­ing centuries.  He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is bet­ter, a heart full of Christian love and humility.  He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times (emphasis mine).  We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod (emphasis mine).  As a theologian he is facile prin­ceps, at least un­surpassed by church father, scholastic, or reformer.  With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times.  He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church (emphasis mine) with practical tact of the Latin.  He was a Chris­tian philosopher and philo­sophical theologian to the full (emphasis mine)….He always asserted, indeed, the primacy of faith….But to him faith itself was an act­ing of reason, and from faith to knowledge, therefore, there was a necessary transition. [1]

He developed the Nicene dogma of the Trin­ity, completed it by the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Ghost, and gave it the form in which it has ever since prevailed in the West, and in which it re­ceived classical expression from his school in the Athanasian Creed. [2]

This is not the opinion of an anti-Trinitarian au­thor; this is the opin­ion of a Trinitarian, unaware of any contro­versy  with his doctrinal stand.  It is obvi­ous that Philip Schaff held Augustine in high regard and was unconcerned with the influence that philos­ophy had upon him.  I find it difficult to believe, and harder to accept, that philosophical thought was al­lowed to gain such a foothold in the Church.  Worse yet, the Church of today is unwilling to “clean house” with an evaluation of Biblical vs. philosophi­cal in­fluence on its doctrine.  The Bible does not en­dorse phi­losophy and philosophy should not be used in interpreting the message of the Bible.  Yet this is exactly what occurred throughout the history of the Christian Church and this is exactly what the foun­dation of modern theological stan­dards are based upon. 

The following excerpt is taken from Max Fishler’s What the Great Philosophers Thought About God. 

Augustine was a product of Platonic rational­ism and Plo­tinian mysticism (emphasis mine), to which he added his Christian in­doctrination.  His entire mental life was a perpetual struggle with the prob­lem of the nature of God:  the three persons in the One God.  So that, both as ratio­nalist and Christian mystic, Augustine’s chief task was to make clear the nature of God–to himself and to the world (emphasis mine).

When still a young man, he came under the in­fluence of neo-Platonism.  This turned out to be of immense sig­nificance in his life; and it was an epoch-making event in the Western world, the first impor­tant contact be­tween Christian religious belief and Greek philosophic thought. 

Augustine had already embraced Christianity when he came across the Enneads of Plotinus.  What did he find there, in Plotinus and neo-Platon­ism, that so entranced him?  The “Idea of the Good”, of Plato, had been trans­formed by Plotinus into the principle of the One.  Plato himself must have had an inkling of important change from the Idea of the Good to the Principle of the One, when he said:  “If the one is not, nothing is.”  The One is that with­out which nothing else could be.  The existence of ev­erything depends upon this eternally subsisting Unity.

This One, however, must not be confused with the numerical one.  It is  not just another number!  It is that Unity from which all multiplicity flows.

From this one, ever-creative and ever-creating, a second principle arises.  And the name of this second principle?  “The Intellect”–begotten of the One and its only offspring; closer, therefore, to the One that anything else in all cre­ation, and the cause of all the diversity of created things.  Plotinus called this, Nous, Mind or Intellect (pp.86-87).

Augustine could find no rest until he would achieve the great transformation:  from Plotinus to Christianity.  How, he asked himself, could the God of Christian­ity be expressed in terms of the Plotinian philosophy?

For many years he labored on this problem.  The clue came at last:  the three persons of the Christian Trinity were all contained herein:  the Christian God with all His essen­tial attributes–God, the Fa­ther, (the One), the Word (the Intel­lect), and God, the author of all creation [emphasis mine]! 

Plotinus had expressed the perennial way in which rea­son grapples with the problem of divinity, or the being of God.  Augustine’s task was now clearly mapped out be­fore him:  to give this Plotinian theology Christian form  (p. 88).

Augustine was blessed with an inquiring mind:  “my unquiet mind was altogether intent to seek for learning”  (Confessions)  especially in matters philo­sophical; so much so that he called Plato a “demigod[3]”  (City of God),  and even after he became a Christian, Augustine still revered his Platonic lineage; in fact, to the end of his days he remained a Pla­tonist [emphasis mine].  Most important, however, for later generations, was the fact that the subtleties of Platon­ism, Aristotelianism and neo-Platonism so sharpened his mind that he could de­fend his Christian faith with a sublime logical eloquence.  His classical Greek training thus made it possible for him to be­come the most convinc­ing as well as the most subtle apologist for the Christian religion.  Au­gustine died in 430 A.D.  For a thousand years thereafter the ener­gies of the best minds in the Western world were de­voted to the construction of logical edifices to prove the existence of God. 

But all of the subsequent proofs for God’s being find expression in this first great Christian philoso­pher (pp. 91,92).

Now, all of the rational proofs for the existence of God involve a transi­tion from thought to reality, from idea to object; and, as if to forestall the modern arguments against such a derivation of the being of God from the idea of God, Augustine warns us that in all rational proofs for God’s ex­istence faith is an essential prerequisite.

Reason alone is insufficient; and proofs by rea­son alone are inadequate. Reason can only demon­strate what faith has already accepted.  Rational demonstration can only induce conviction when faith has already embraced as true what the demonstration seeks to substantiate.

In short, knowledge of God through rea­son must always be incomplete.  Faith alone is suf­ficient; faith is sure; the way of faith is di­rect.  Reason, by itself, may lead one astray; faith should precede rea­son, for, there is always the danger, in the case of reason, of distorted vision, through sin; but there is no conflict be­tween the two, reason and faith [emphasis mine]. 

In fact, whoever has not found the way of faith must resort to reason; but it is a poor substitute for faith, thinks Augustine.  On the other hand, when one first believes that God exists, then the rationality of that belief can be easily demonstrated (pp. 94,95).

The Triune God

Augustine’s main aim is to find a ra­tional justification for the triune God of Christianity (emphasis mine).  The mysteries of divine Being cannot be revealed through any corporeal or anthropomor­phic notions.  We can only know God as he really is through faith in the revealed doctrines of Christianity, and it is the Bible that contains these.  The authority of the Scriptures therefore would suffice for a proper apprecia­tion of the divine nature; but we find in the Bible many anthropomorphic expres­sions and corporeal figures of speech, such as:  “I the Lord thy God, am a jealous God”.  These anthropomorphic expres­sions are to be under­stood symbolically, not literally.  From the material and human we must rise to the spiritual and divine.  We must so purge our minds as to ” to be able to see ineffably that which is ineffable.”  To this state we can be “nourished by faith….that we may be rendered apt and able to com­prehend it.”  (De trin.)

And so it is also with the divine Substance, which can only be under­stood by a transcendental leap beyond the let­ter the Biblical account.  The Bible tells us that God is a trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; these are three per­sons who are one and the same substance or essence.  These are not three Gods, but One, since the three persons have “a divine unity of one and the same substance in a indivisible equal­ity.”  (Ibid).

But the unity must not be so understood as to de­stroy the distinctions within the Godhead;  “the Fa­ther is not the Son; and the Son is not the Fa­ther; and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son Son but only the Spirit of the Father and the Son.”

Augustine’s interpretation of the trinity insists on three persons, each of whom may be distinguished from the others, but all of whom are insepara­ble be­cause they have but one nature or essence.  Thus we may call the trin­ity one essence or substance and three persons, or one essence and three metaphysical sub­strates–so long as the reality of the distinctions within the divine Being is expressed, while their unity, equality and inseparability is also acknowl­edged; so long, says Augustine, as it is realized that these names “did not intend diversity to be meant, but singleness to be denied.”  (Detrin.)  (p.107).  [4]

A corroborating quotation from another source.

St. Augustine adopts a number of Hellenic doc­trines, especially those of the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Pro­phyry.  His knowledge of Plato and Aristotle is very lim­ited and indirect; he knows much more of the Stoics, Epi­cureans and Academicians and, above all, Cicero.  This invaluable stock of Greek philosophy passes into Christianity and the Middle Ages through St. Augustine [emphasis mine]. But he gen­erally adapts the con­tributions of the Greeks to the philo­sophic necessities of Christian dogma; this is the earliest in­stance in which Greek phi­losophy as such comes into con­tact with Christianity [emphasis mine].  Thanks to these efforts, the stabilization of dogma takes a vast step forward and St. Augustine becomes the most important of the Latin Church Fathers. His philo­sophical work is one of the major sources that later metaphysics drew upon.

….It is from St. Augustine that are ultimately derived the concept of the fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding)  and the principle credo ut intelligam (I be­lieve in order to understand)–a con­cept and a princi­ple that are to have profound reper­cussions in Scholasticism, espe­cially in St. Anselm and St. Thomas.  The problems of the relationship between faith and knowledge, between religion and theology, are already posed in St. Augustine’s work.

St. Augustine adopts the philosophy of Plato [emphasis mine], but with important changes. [5]

Two things should become clear after reading and grasping the pre­vious quotations.  1.  There should be ab­solutely no doubt concern­ing the degree of influence that philosophy exercised over Augus­tine.  2.  It should be easy to understand why con­demnation is experienced when­ever an attempt is made to understand the doctrine of the Trinity.  Au­gustine expects faith to override any ques­tions con­cerning God’s nature and expects one to accept the proposed doctrine at face value.  Hence the state­ment:  How can you a finite man expect to know God, an infinite being.  You cannot know or under­stand the doctrine of the Trin­ity, you must accept it by faith.

[1] Schaff, Volume III, pp. 997, 998.

[2] Ibid., Volume III, p. 1017.

[3] Definition: a mythological being who is partly divine and partly human.

[4] Fishler,  Portions: pp.86-107

[5] Marias, pp. 115, 116.