Saint Augustine’s Philosophy: Reason, Faith, and Existence
Saint Augustine: Reason and Faith
For Christians, the truth is found in the Bible. Augustine sees a reconciliation between reason and faith, so why not reach where faith reaches? Saint Augustine distinguishes three steps:
- The reason helps man to achieve faith.
- Faith guides the reason.
- The reason, in turn, helps to further clarify the contents of faith.
Saint Augustine summarized this process in two propositions: the prevalence of faith over reason, and reason is an instrument of clarification to the faith.
Ontology Equals Theology
Theology studies the fundamentals of a religion.
Concept Creation
The establishment is a free act of God. God freely created the universe from nothing, created the world according to his own image, based on ideas or archetypes that he has in his mind.
All ideas are models of what constitutes the world. This is known as exemplarism, i.e., the essences of all created things are in God’s mind as examples or models of things.
Another theory that completes the idea of the creation of Saint Augustine is the theory of the seminal reasons. At the time of creation, God placed in a kind of seed material, necessary under the circumstances, to germinate, giving rise to the emergence of new beings that would develop with posterity.
Emanation theory attempts to explain how God creates the world. It is a spread of the very being of God, i.e., God emanating from authorities.
For Saint Augustine, there is a hierarchy among men, some superior to others. Augustine defends the transcendence of God: all creation is part of God, but it has its own nature. That God is transcendent means that God is beyond reality. God is provident because he cares for his creation, for the beings he has created.
Time, according to Saint Augustine, was created by God, so it makes no sense to ask what God did before creation. Time has no objective existence. Accordingly, if there were no humans, there would be no time.
Epistemology
Knowledge for Augustine is going to be a process of:
Internalization: For Augustine, the starting point to search for truth lies within, in the privacy of consciousness.
Self-Transcendence: This man has to recognize that nature is mutable, but despite this, the truth is immutable, as an excess of the same nature that belongs to God. There are two kinds of knowledge in the soul:
- Lower reason: its goal of science is knowledge, i.e., knowledge of sensitive and mutable realities of our physical environment in order to meet our basic needs.
- Higher reason: its object of knowledge is wisdom, which consists of knowledge of the intelligible order to rise to God. To make this possible, there must be something (the lighting).
The Theory of Light
The soul knows the immutable truths or ideals through divine illumination. This knowledge depends on an act of God and happens when God acts upon us and enlightens us to consider their ideas. Lighting is also a moral process; it only occurs in holy and pure souls.
Demonstrating the Existence of God
The proof is from the interior of the ideas and characteristics of immutability and necessity. The nature of the ideas, in contrast to the mutability of human nature, resists an immutable truth.
Anthropology
Saint Augustine advocates an anthropological dualism where human beings are composed of body and soul. The functions of the soul are the top reason, it is the place of memory and will. Augustine denies that souls have existed or have been embodied in other bodies. The two theories explaining the origin of the world are:
- Creationism: God creates the soul whenever a new birth of a human being occurs.
- Traducianism: the soul is transmitted from father to son.
Ethics
For Saint Augustine, the end of the human being is happiness, and ultimate happiness is divine love, to reach God.
Freedom is reached by the original sin, whereby we are all predestined to be bad, so freedom is limited by the grace of God. Two Concepts of Liberty:
- Libertas: is a state of bliss in which you cannot sin (freedom to do good).
- Free will: It is the ability to choose between Good and Evil.
Concept of property: For Augustine, only the foundation and content of this morality is the love of God. He who loves God does not need laws, as this brings the fulfillment of good.
Predestination means being predetermined. There are two opposing doctrines of the position of Saint Augustine:
- Manichaeism: they say that the universe consists of the principle of good (the man is good), the principle of evil (which is bad).
- Pelagianism: denies original sin and affirms the human capacity to do good without the need for divine grace.
Presence: This means that God knows everything and has foreknowledge of our actions.
Problem of Evil
Moral evil: produced by man, who is responsible. Physical evil: it is he who has no origin in man. Saint Augustine said: Evil is not something positive, not a positive reality, but a privation, a lack of good.
Politics
His theory is based on a philosophy of history, which is a reflection that seeks to give meaning to history. It has two reasons we need this theory:
- Christianity sees history as the scene where God appears to humans.
- Saint Augustine’s reflections were motivated by the fall of the Roman Empire.
For Saint Augustine, the story will involve a struggle between two people: the earthly city of residence or those who believe in God, and God’s city, home to the believers.
The earthly city: state, city of God: Church.
From this developed political Augustinianism. Two ways:
- Primacy of the church over the state. The church is the only perfect society and therefore superior to the state.
- It minimizes the role of government, i.e., the state is necessary in spite of being subordinate. Its function is to organize the coexistence, promoting peace and terrestrial welfare.