Saint Augustine: God, Creation, Knowledge, and the Soul
The Philosophical Attitude of Saint Augustine
Saint Augustine’s major concerns are God and the soul, believing that man has the will to reach God. When he speaks of Christian truth, Saint Augustine makes no question of the relationship between reason and faith, which are sources of true knowledge—separate but complementary and mutually supportive.
God
There are two issues to address:
- The Existence of God: There are several arguments for God’s existence:
- The order and beauty of the world.
- The existence of ideas or eternal truths (there must be something that has caused them, and that is God).
- Consensus (everyone has knowledge of God).
- Essence of God: We do not know God’s essence, but we can know some attributes, such as immutability, eternity, goodness, and perfection, among others.
Creation
Creation is divided into two orders:
- God created the universe, including chaotic matter and ideas in the mind of God. These ideas serve as models, and from them, God creates what we see.
- The world, the cosmos, has been created by God. Saint Augustine says that God created everything at once, in simultaneous and successive acts.
Knowledge
This is known as the “Theory of Illumination.” Like Plato, Saint Augustine believed that knowledge is the apprehension of an object that does not change. Truths, which enter through thought, are purely intelligible, necessary, immutable, and eternal. While Plato used the theory of reminiscence, Saint Augustine says that the human soul knows these truths by divine illumination. God acts as a sun that illuminates our minds, enabling us to perceive such truths. This is the only action that is necessary, immutable, and eternal like God. God created the world in love so that man might have need of it. We tend toward the immutable and absolute, but this can only be seen as divine in man: the soul. Therefore, you only get to God through introspection.
Man
Man is composed of two different substances: body and soul. As Plato said, the body is the lower part of man (something material). The soul belongs to the essence of man and is necessary to be a human being. For Saint Augustine, the soul is spiritual, simple, and indivisible. The soul is immortal because, having no parts, it cannot decompose or corrupt.
There are two explanations for the problem of the origin of the soul:
- Creationism: While our parents give us life, God creates the individual human soul. Original sin means that there is a plan of salvation through baptism, which erases original sin but leaves us inclined to evil. Saint Augustine says that God must lend us a hand (Grace) to save us.
- Traducianism: The soul is transmitted through our parents when we are born.
Ethics and Morality
Volunteer moral: A man decides to do good or evil. Saint Augustine was a voluntarist, unlike intellectual moralism, where we weigh advantages and disadvantages to determine good and evil. Saint Augustine initially followed the Manichean solution, which places the origin of good and evil in two principles. The mixture of these principles originated the world.
Saint Augustine later transformed this view, stating that evil is the absence of good and the absence of being. He distinguished two types of evil:
- Physical Evil: The effect of original sin and the punishment that God imposes.
- Moral Evil: What man does morally wrong (lying, cheating, etc.), resulting in eternal damnation.
Freedom: God created us free, but we tend toward evil. He tries to guide us from right and wrong.
The Two Cities
In “The City of God,” there is a philosophy of history, the first of its kind, that tries to explain the role of God. It is one of his most important works, written around 412 AD. It analyzes the meaning of universal history. There are two elements to understand this philosophy of history:
- Providencialism: Historical time is the field where the development plan outlined by God unfolds.
- History unfolds linearly in six ages, from creation to the end of time, guided by divine providence.
The central theme is the dynamics of the “two loves,” which speaks of two kinds of men: those of the state (the earthly city) and those of the Church (the City of God).