Saint Augustine’s Philosophy: Truth, God, Creation, and Humanity
Saint Augustine’s Philosophy
The Nature of Truth and Knowledge
Saint Augustine’s philosophy addresses the skeptic by asserting that existence presupposes a first truth: truth itself. Knowledge is understood through two key aspects:
- Internalization: Sensible objects are characterized by instability and impermanence, making knowledge derived solely from them unreliable.
- Transcendence (Epistemological): True knowledge involves learning about stable and permanent objects. The soul, through internalization, encounters objects of a higher nature than its own. Thus, the soul’s need for a foundation of light leads it to seek truth “in the inner man,” which points to a higher God.
Properties of Truth and Ideas
The nature of truth, for Augustine, is a normative principle of thought, providing the reason for intelligibility in objects (ideas). Ideas possess essential properties:
- Immutability: Ideas are necessarily immutable; they can never cease to be what they are, nor can they change.
- Eternity: What is immutable is eternal. Eternity and time are distinguished not by duration, but by how the immutable governs mobility.
Classes and Place of Ideas
Augustine distinguishes several classes of ideas:
- Logic
- Mathematics
- Ethics
True ideas are found when the soul transcends itself, as truth is something intelligible, immutable, and necessary.
Access to Truth: Divine Illumination
The human soul, in its higher part, comes to know truths through an intellectual vision. Saint Augustine insists that the soul discovers truth within itself; the superior interior of the soul discovers eternal truths, illuminated by the divine theory of illumination.
Analysis of Divine Illumination: Divine illumination is a light that reflects ideas within the mind, acting as images reflecting the Divinity. Augustine’s notion of truth is not merely an adequation between thought and reality, but something deeper and more profound.
Augustinian Theology: The Existence of God
The divine demonstration of God’s existence is an immediate consequence of Augustine’s theory of knowledge. Since God exists, truth finds its foundation in God.
All Augustinian proofs for God’s existence share the same structure: they move from the interior to the exterior and from the inferior to the superior.
Divine Nature and Attributes
- Specific Attribute of Divinity: God is Being in its fullness, the eternal Truth. Eternity and immutability are derived properties: God’s immutability means He can never change.
- The Divine Trinity: For Augustine, unity and trinity are not mutually exclusive at the divine level. He proposes a single divine nature in three persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) who are equal in nature and duration, differing only in their order of procession (the Son from the Father, the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son).
- Divine Properties:
- God is excellence by essence, the supreme Truth and Good.
- His being is maximally eternal and immutable.
- His being is knowing, provident, prescient, and creator.
- His goodness orders all anxieties of happiness and is an immutable source.
The Creation of the World
The world does not have an eternal beginning and is not self-subsistent. The creative act of God depends solely on God’s free will.
Augustine denies the eternity of the world, asserting that everything mutable has a beginning and an end. The world’s temporality means it was created with time; time did not exist before the world.
Augustinian Anthropology: The Nature of Man
Man is a being composed of two substances: body and soul.
The Soul as Image of the Trinity
The soul is an image of the Trinity. From the relationship between knowledge and mind, love emerges. Man was created in the image and likeness of God. God, in His eternal Trinity, is a full Being, absolute love, and total truth. Man, a contingent being, seeks truth, knowledge, and wisdom, preferentially through love. He needs to love and be loved for the three faculties of happiness.
Augustine identifies three faculties of the soul: memory, intelligence, and will. The human soul, having three distinct faculties, mirrors God, who is one being in three distinct persons. Each faculty expresses the whole soul as a trinity.
From the fact of these persons, the memory of being is present, knowledge relates to God, and love relates to oneself (and God).
The Path to God/Truth
The journey to God can be understood in two ways:
- Globally: This involves moving from a rejection of the external world, seeking to transcend within oneself, and then ascending to the superior (God).
- By Faculties:
- Memory:
- Sensible memory
- Memory of self
- Memory of God
- Knowledge (Intelligence):
- Sensible knowledge
- Knowledge of self
- Knowledge of God
- Will:
- Sensible will
- Will for self
- Will for God
- Memory:
The soul itself can make sensible or intelligible things present. For Augustine, memory is not merely having an account present; it encompasses “I am and what I know of God.” Knowledge is categorized as sensible and intelligible (the latter being the only authentic form). The will is the faculty of choice and desire.