St. Augustine on Being, Knowledge, and Love in The City of God
St. Augustine on Being, Knowledge, and Love in *The City of God*
Chapter 27: Essence of Being, Knowledge, and Love
This fragment belongs to Chapter 27 of *The City of God*, entitled “Essence of Both,” written by St. Augustine of Hippo. In the text, the author refers to knowledge, which is characteristic of people, unlike animals, and enables them to reach God. Animals cannot come to knowledge, as all elements except the human being are made to be known, not to know. The excerpt also notes that the theory of the absence of good is wrong. Finally, we note the three basic principles that are told throughout the text: being, knowledge, and love.
ANA: The main theme of the fragment is the problem of being, knowledge, and love, to which St. Augustine proposes three solutions: creation, enlightenment, and love. Throughout the text, a series of theses are developed that support the main theme.
The first thesis we find is that of knowledge. St. Augustine presents the knowledge of people, not animals, and we reach that by knowledge of eternal truths through enlightenment. The second argument is that of creation: God made things including, at an initial stage, the evolution and changes that they would have throughout history. Third, we find a thesis related to justice, good, and evil, as regards right and wrong, and relate it to the theory of evil. Finally, we include another thesis, that of love, for man exists, knows, and loves this. To understand the text, we must clarify a very important term: “incorporeal light,” which is God.
From these theses and concepts, we can explain the text in depth, always based on the thought of St. Augustine.
St. Augustine’s First Thesis: Knowledge and Wisdom
Regarding the first thesis, the author talks about how man loves wisdom, to know, and to be like Him. For man to come to the knowledge of the Divinity, he should carry out a process of internalization. For the author, the truth is immutable and eternal. From this, we conduct a fundamentalization of self-knowledge. With this, we think we know what we think we exist, with what we get something immutable.
Any process of internalization involves seeking truth and being as immutable within, in the soul, which is changeable and also formed by feelings that are representations of the sensory and changeable. If we continue with internalization, we find the rules by which we judge feelings and things. These rules are considered timeless and therefore outside of change, and as knowledge. These rules cannot come from the soul, nor from outside; they must come from something eternal and unchanging: God. The inner leads us to discover God. The ability to judge things by these rules is called science, and knowledge of God, the ultimate truth, is wisdom. Knowing these rules is done by divine illumination; it is an action carried out by God on names and gives these uptake of the intelligible in itself.
St. Augustine’s Second Thesis: Creation and Immutability
In relation to the second thesis, things have been created to be known, not to know, because God, in creation, so made it with its changes and future developments. The proclamation of the mutability of things that have been created by God from nothing. But although the establishment is temporary, it requires that changes have not been built up over time but in creation. God created the world and ushered in the future changes required by germs, so the body says that human beings have causes latent in nature. The species are immutable.
St. Augustine’s Third Thesis: Justice, Good, and Evil
The third argument refers to righteousness, which is in the inner man. Inside, St. Augustine sees justice as a problem, as there are good and evil. For this, he defines evil as pure non-being, as something that has no positive character; it is thus the absence of good. Plotinus’s conception of evil (as non-being) can be explained as being benevolent, God and author of all that exists, evil as this is not substantial. The author distinguishes two kinds of evils: physical and moral. Moral evil, sin, is the fruit of ill will that is sensible in putting God, and physical evil (pain, sickness, or death) is a consequence of moral evil and original sin.
St. Augustine’s Fourth Thesis: Love and Charity
As a last argument to support the main theme, we have love, charity, and understanding. As we find in the piece, it concludes that there is one who knows and loves so that. Love is understood as charity, which consists in loving God and men in terms of God. Depending on whether you have love toward God or toward sensible things, neglecting other people, you belong to the City of God or the earthly city.
Contextualizing St. Augustine and *The City of God*
Cntxt: The text discussed above belongs to St. Augustine. He was born in Tagaste (now Algeria) in 354 AD, to a pagan father and a Christian mother. In 373, he read a work of Cicero and became interested in philosophy. He adhered to the Manichean doctrine, but it was insufficient. He became interested in Cicero and skepticism. Then he read some texts by Plotinus and Plato, and in 386, he converted to Christianity and was ordained a priest of Hippo, where he died in 430. He is the most important figure of the Church Fathers. Augustine describes the initial and final stages of his thinking that led him to a busy life after his conversion to Christianity.
The City of God can be placed in the last period of his life, a period of high fertility as a writer, dedicated to exposing the main doctrines of the Christian doctrine and combating the heresies that existed at the time: Manichaeism, Pelagianism, and Donatism. On a philosophical level, we find in the text a desire to overcome the strong influence that skepticism had on all existing philosophical schools. Other important works of the author are The Confessions and De Trinitate.
The text we are commenting on belongs to Book XI of The City of God. It was written by St. Augustine of Hippo, among other reasons, to defend Christians from the criticism of the pagans. Augustine is forced to respond and inspire courage. The book took 14 years to write (between 413 and 427) and represents one of the most elaborate works written by the author during a period when he carried out a great deal of work as Bishop of Hippo and as a theologian and advocate of Christian doctrine.
Neoplatonism’s Influence on St. Augustine
One of the philosophical currents on which St. Augustine based his thinking is Neoplatonism, a spiritual-metaphysical interpretation of Platonic philosophy that emerged from the hand of Plotinus in the third century AD. For St. Augustine, Plato came to the truth, and he finds it amazing that there are so many elements of Platonic philosophy that coincide with Christianity, which is due, according to St. Augustine, to divine illumination. However, Plato did not know Jesus Christ, and hence his philosophical errors.
St. Augustine, like Plato, distinguishes between intelligible knowledge and sensitive knowledge, which only provides opinion (the senses only capture multiplicity, not unity, as we see in the text). However, in assessing the data from this knowledge, he differs from Plato, approaching Plotinus. For St. Augustine, the Platonic Good represents God and the Plotinian One (as Father), and the Platonic Demiurge and Plotinus’s Nous represent the Son, the Logos, the mind of God, where ideas are found.
St. Augustine’s Legacy
The influence of Augustine would persist throughout the Middle Ages until the 13th and 14th centuries, in the thought of Anselm of Canterbury, Avicenna, the Franciscan Order, and especially in San Buenaventura. His theses mark a line of thought known as Augustinianism. It will be St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, who will develop another line of thought that seeks to overcome basic Augustinian philosophy. In the Renaissance, there will be a renewed interest in Augustinian Neoplatonism. We can also sense the influence of St. Augustine in Descartes, who, at the beginning of the modern age, gives his principle of certainty, “Cogito, ergo sum,” which has a clear antecedent in the Augustinian self (“Si fallor, sum”).