Augustine’s Philosophy: God, Creation, Ethics, and Freedom
Augustine’s Philosophy: God and Creation
God is made visible through their effects.
The proof of consent: universal humanity agrees that there is a being above all things.
To analyze the concepts of knowledge and truth, the human being sensitively judges things through ideas that are imprinted in his soul. God as the foundation is a solid argument for their existence.
The nature of God for Augustine is beyond what we can understand and put into words. This is negative theology: we can only say what God is not, because God is beyond what the human mind can comprehend. Augustine uses a phrase from the Bible to define God as the Self, for he alone is unchanging. All other creatures are mutable, and everything is changing. In things, there is a mixture of being and nonbeing. It follows for Augustine that things could not have created themselves; they were created by God.
The Created World (Augustine)
God creates the world out of nothing. The world is not eternal. The world has been created and has a beginning and an end. Only God is eternal and is distinguishable from Creation. St. Augustine advocates for a transcendental God.
He created the world outside of time, because time begins at the time of Creation.
He created the world by his free will to make creatures as part of his perfection.
Faced with the Neoplatonic idea of matter as a source of evil, Augustine says that matter was also created by God and therefore cannot be the source of evil.
Augustinian Ethics: Evil and Freedom
Evil
Evil does not originate in matter, which was created by God and therefore is good. Augustine takes from Plotinus the concept of evil as privation: evil is the absence of good. Since deprivation does not have an efficient cause, Augustine defends an optimistic view of the world. His conception of evil is gloomy, although Augustine applies to man the very concept of evil: moral evil is also the deprivation of property in a nature that may hold such property. Evil arises from the improper use man makes of his free will. Thus, man is responsible for evil and not God.
Freedom and Free Will
Man has been created free, with the ability to turn towards God or away from him.
Augustine distinguishes between the concepts of free will and freedom:
- Free will is the ability of humans to act voluntarily and which is oriented toward evil.
- Freedom is the ability to make good use of free will.
Although man was created free, from the moment he commits original sin, he retains only a reduced freedom to love God because the human will tends to stray. The human soul is marked by original sin and tends toward the body. Augustine defends that the soul thus cannot save itself if God does not give it supernatural power.
The Relationship Between Faith and Reason
Aquinas distinguished between:
Natural Theology: That part of philosophy that deals with theological issues (such as the existence of God).
Dogmatic Theology: Discourse founded on revelation and transmitted in the Bible.
The reflection of St. Thomas follows these steps:
- Independence and autonomy between reason and faith.
- The reason (philosophy) is to apply logical procedures based on knowledge of the sensible world.