Augustine and Medieval Theology CH511 LESSON 11 of 24 Scott T. Carroll, PhD Experience: Professor of Ancient History, Cornerstone University Hello again, it s good to be with you. I trust that your study and your ministry and life are going well. Today we re going to begin a series of lectures that will look at Augustine s works, and you ll be invited in your syllabus to be reading these. They ll be mandatory reading. My hope is to provide for you some guidance and some background information as you move through these works. They re arranged chronologically and thematically. But before we go any further, let s pray together, as our habit s been, and I ll be drawing a line in prayer out of a work by Augustine called the Soliloquies, and we ll be referring to these off and on throughout today and in the future as well. But in Soliloquies, book 1, chapter 2, Augustine says, O God, framer of the universe, grant me first rightly to invoke Thee, then to show myself worthy to be heard by Thee, and lastly deign to set me free. The entire beginning part of this devotional work is a series of prayers, and we ll draw thoughts out of these in several lectures to come. But with this in mind, let s pray together. Our Father, we do come before You, and we acknowledge that You are the framer of the universe and in that we stand in awe before You. We recognize Your power, Your preeminence, and Your sovereignty, and we feel humbled before You, and as Your children, needy, beggarly, and always in need of Your grace and Your love and Your intercession. We acknowledge this to us and toward us, and we pray that Your cleansing work of the atonement through Christ, the application through the Spirit of Your blessed Word to our lives would help to direct our steps to be straight, our path to be even, that we might, hiding behind Christ, be found worthy to come to You as needy children. And Father, we pray that in fact our wills will be set free in service to You, that our efforts would be found to be pleasing. Now we ask that You d watch over our time together, that it might be a sacrifice of our gratitude to You as we stand in respectful awe of Your work in one such as Augustine. We ask these things in the name of the risen Intercessor. Amen. 1 of 11
It s good to be with you again, and as I said, today we re going to begin talking about some of Augustine s works, and you ll be reading some of these things and you ll find them, I m sure, to be of great interest and challenge. Let s briefly, though, summarize from the last lecture. You ll recall that we began to set up Augustine as a thinker. We made a transition away from him and his chronology, biographical sketch, and we ve shifted toward now beginning to look at his works and their relevance. We ll be going always back to the biographical background that we ve established, so you ll keep in touch with that chronology so as to give a framework to these works. But we want to look at them independently and separately now. So as we ve thought about Augustine in his place in the history of Christian thought, we see him as a very important thinker, in many ways the cornerstone to medieval theology and to Reformation theology. He is a linchpin thinker as we compare him against previous Christian thinkers and as well to see him in the stream, the evolutionary stream of classical thought. He infuses into the classical philosophy truly Christian concepts of faith and authority and faith wedded with reason, and he adds to this a realm of ethics, and he becomes the primary voice of Christian theology and philosophy for centuries. He s one of the few great, premiere Christian thinkers who is looked at by the non-christian world as one whose contributed to it in a substantive way. But now we ll look at the major works, and we ll see how these ideas evolved and the exact things that he was taken on, vis-à-vis the works themselves. Today our main objectives will be to look at his earliest writings, and we ll try to gain an understanding of some of his early interests, the doctrinal formulations that were taking place in his life. We ll think about the past philosophical and cultic influences, and at the same time, things that were prevalent in and around him. We will also look to try to find a connection with this world of ideas, and yet we ll look to see his earnest attempt to convert his former knowledge and to bring it to a useful Christian service. I d like to look at Augustine as a teacher. I d like to finally look at some special themes. We ll look at Augustine s perceptive analysis, his keen mind, and what we may find to be quite surprising is actual anticipation of future ideas that will be prevalent in philosophy in particular. In order to begin looking at Augustine s earliest works, it s important to realize that they are inchoate in some ways. They form the earliest stages of his theological maturity. At the same time they form a bridge from his past life, his converted life, to his life of a Christian bishop and a theologian, and one can look at these works from either perspective. We will on the one hand be 2 of 11
looking back to his former life and looking at some of the strains of influences that can be readily seen in these works, and at the same time we ll be looking forward to how these works lead us to another land across the stream, as it were. These are important works then as they represent a transition in Augustine s early Christian life. There ll be an examination in these works of some major theories that were prevalent in his world. For instance, he ll take on Manichean dualism and the whole question of the origin of evil, which we ve talked a little bit about previously. He ll look at skepticism, particularly as it pervaded Platonic schools and its potential influence on the life of faith, and he will look at transient neo-platonism, and he takes these trends on head on in these early works. In order to give you some understanding of the historical settings and background, we re talking about just after Augustine s conversion, and we re looking at from about the fall of 386 up until his baptism in Easter 387. And then we ll be looking subsequently from 387 to 389, but that first part, right after his conversion, Augustine resigned as a professor in Milan. Due to health reasons and some other factors, he wanted to go into seclusion for study, and a grammarian of the city had at his disposal a villa in Cassiciacum, which was north of the city of Milan. Tthere Augustine went into retreat, as it were, with his mother, his son, a brother, two cousins, and two young pupils, and a friend. And there they did some light manual labor, but they worked together and studied together, and study and the pursuit of philosophical discussions was their main focus throughout the day. There was a stenographer who was there who took notes on their discussions, and then later Augustine went through and revised these notes. He fashioned them after Plato s dialogues, and so this would be a common method of philosophical discussion and inquiry, a way of teaching and presentation, which in some cases for students from an American context may seem to be somewhat alien as you read the dialogue that takes place between teacher and pupil. It s very Socratic, and the teacher is working to lead the student into truth and understanding. It s absolutely opposite to this method in some ways of my talking to you through time by means of recordings, and it took a different kind of skill, both a different skill in the teacher and in the learner, where there was active engagement and it was very closely tied to Socratic and Platonic ideas of the soul and of knowledge and of learning. But you will see, as you read some of these works, that they are patterned after this, and it was not some kind of ploy done afterwards but, in fact, probably represents the dialogue of sorts that was taking place. 3 of 11
One can sense the excitement, interest, and kind of engagement that was taking place here in this villa in these early months following Augustine s conversion. The works can be divided between several works that were written at Cassiciacum and then several that were written just after following his baptism. Augustine had previously written a philosophical tract while in Carthage, but that s been lost to us. It s no longer extent, and so these represent his very earliest efforts. So let s take a look at some of the special themes and works, and we ll take them in chronological order, and we ll talk about them briefly and give you some kind of a setting or moorings for them as then you will go out to read to these things. We begin with the work on The Happy Life, and the setting for this work was Augustine s thirty-third birthday, and they re sitting around to look what they re going to discuss at his birthday party. They re going to talk about a person s pilgrimage to learning and understanding with the goal of attaining wisdom, and Augustine s going to see this as a tempestuous journey, like sea travel that we talked about, fraught with the difficulties and dangers of impending doom, and as he s thinking about this, he sees as the chief obstacle to one s intended goal of a happy life would be intellectual pride. For Augustine, this intellectual pride was epitomized in Manichaeism because the Manichees in their kind of philosophical religiosity attempted to explain many of the profound and difficult problems of existence in life with their dualism and the battle between good and evil as a way of explaining the origins of evil, for instance. In particular, he would condemn the Manicheans from preventing him from seeing that God and the soul were incorporeal, that they were not physical, that they were spiritual beings, and he saw the conclusions resulting from a kind of intellectual pride, and so he begins in this discourse with his students and friends and relatives with a condemnation of intellectual pride and looking very clearly though to the goal of wisdom. Where can one assume to find a happy life? This is a relevant question even for us today as we think about where s true happiness found. Where is contentment found in life? And we ll see that in Augustine s works, he will be influenced by Platonic thought at several points; in particular in this one, Platonic influences are clearly evident. In one place he would argue that the soul is in need of nourishment, that this nourishment is knowledge, and that it hungers for this knowledge, and that the source of all vice to Augustine is the lack of knowledge. This is something that s very neo-platonic, and that is that evil is the privation of good and that the lack of good is in fact evil, and so as Augustine s thinking about whether evil should be understood as something apart from 4 of 11
my existence or in fact a result of non-goodness. I mean, these are two distinct ideas. It s kind of like if you were to think of the quip, The devil made me do it, is the idea that the evil exists outside of me and runs around in a red suit with horns and a long tail and a pitchfork and a black goatee, and in some ways I m not taking away from the personality of the devil or demonic forces in no way at all but surely would not deify those things. You see, if evil was independently existent, then God, in fact, would send evil to hell and not humans, but there s this kind of close correlation between what one is and what they do or don t do, and so one is defined by action. This is very Augustinian as he s thinking about these aspects, and they will directly correlate with his idea of the happy life here in a minute. But let me take another adage out of kind of contemporary pew theology, and that is the notion that one should love the sinner but hate the sin. I think I understand what s meant by that, but as we compare it against Augustine s thinking here, just developing this idea of the notion of evil, I think that he would strongly urge that evil cannot be separated from what we do and what we are, that it s impossible to make that separation, that kind of dualism in the individual. And so Augustine will begin with this idea of what is bad and what is evil as he s thinking about the happy life, and he draws from Platonic or neo-platonic thought about the notion of good and evil. A second Platonic assumption becomes evident in this work when he thinks about good and bad people, and he will say that virtuous people can possess blessedness in life and yet live in pain and misfortune, and yet you can have vicious people who enjoy all the temporal blessings of wealth and power and sensual pleasures and fame and yet they are as far removed from the blessed life as one could imagine. Augustine would say that in fact the former rather than the latter enjoys a blessed life. It s the person who has virtue, and there ll be a strong connection between virtue and the happy life, that in fact a person who lives their life bent on achieving temporal fame, the things of this world, will in fact be destined to unhappiness because they will never be free from anxiety because they will always have the fear of losing what they really truly love. This is a powerful condemnation for the world in which Augustine lived, a kind of materialism, and it is as well a condemnation of many in our world today and in the church where goods and things and the stuff of this life bring us happiness rather than eternal things and change character and fellowship with God. In fact, Augustine would see that oftentimes it s the virtue and fellowship with God that doesn t result in the stuff of this life, but in eternal stuff and suffering in this life as we carry Christ s cross and are conformed to His death. 5 of 11
This flies in the face of some contemporary theology that makes a correlation between blessings and God s favor, health and wealth, so to speak, and Augustine would reject that and say, No, it s virtue and knowledge of God that lead to wisdom that really brings true contentment and not what one has. As he thinks about the knowledge of God, he opens up in this work a question that will be addressed later in another work, and that is whether, in fact, knowledge of God is truly attainable or not and if it s not attainable, why not? There will be many skeptics who will say you can t really come to truth. You can t really come to a real apprehension of God, and this is always outside of us, and Augustine would acknowledge that on the one hand because of our temporal experience, but yet the fact that Augustine would insist on is that the major obstacle between us and the knowledge of God is a moral obstacle. It s that we have inordinate desires that steer us away from our true source of being, God Himself, and that wisdom is something that is tied to virtue. It s a condition that s within, whereby the soul is transformed. So as Augustine looks at how the happy life is worked out, he would see that it is one that is not found in achievement, in temporal goods, in marriage, in status, and stuff. These are all the things of Augustine s former life, and remember, this is his first work that he s writing after his conversion. It s very interesting that he s resigned his post and this is what he s writing about. In some ways it represents a charter for his future, a goal that he s setting for his loved ones that are around him as an objective to live for, and he sees that true contentment and fulfillment can only be found in knowing God and living a life of virtue and wisdom. In the end, though, Augustine will say that he s not achieved this, but it s something that he hopes to achieve, and so we have no hint of any kind of intellectual pride at all in his work. This is his very first work that he s written and that survived to us and one of great interest that not only challenges ideas of his own day but also ideas that are prevalent in our day today. A second work deals with skepticism and truth and again is very relevant to our own day today. A work called Against the Skeptics, and in this work he begins by giving some background information on the emergence of skepticism out of the Platonic academy. He ll give kind of a historical description of how the skeptical school develops and the conflict between the Platonists and the Stoics, and he ll go through and kind of give a historical description of the growth of skepticism, which is a very popular philosophical position in Augustine s day and age, as it is in our own day and age. There s a very close correlation between skepticism and relativism. Today relativism is a very popular philosophical position, and a fruit of relativism is skepticism. If one thing is 6 of 11
potentially, probably, possibly as true or real as another thing, then you may come to a very realistic conclusion that one is as valid as another, one can t determine between one and the other, so there s kind of a healthy skepticism that s held and a disregard for truth. Augustine will criticize skepticism, and he sees skepticism as a major stumbling block to faith as a Christian. Augustine was influenced by skeptical thought and was exposed to it while in Rome, and he sees this as a thing that would keep someone from coming to faith and to true knowledge. The two major things that Augustine will use against skepticism are faith and reason, and he will see these two things wedded together as a way of advancing a claim or counterclaim against skepticism. With each of these works, it s important to look at Augustine s retractions that he wrote toward the end of his life, and one can see that he s looking for more a mature Christian perspective as he s working through these issues and editing them toward the end of his life. But the point is that while Augustine s ideas on faith and reason will evolve, and here is one of the earliest works that deals with this, he will always see a concordant between faith and reason. The two working together in an important way and inseparably bound together. In this work, Augustine will in the dialogue begin with his two pupils who are with him, and they ll be debating with one another. He ll work with them, and he ll talk with them about how can one really know what is true, and do we know by sensory perception? Do we know things innately? And he will get them to think about these things. It s interesting that one individual who s trying to assert a skeptical position will assert it dogmatically, and this will cause us to stand back and kind of laugh a little bit that anyone who s truly a skeptic in fact could not be dogmatic, but there s kind of this ambivalence that he s working on as his students and his friends are discussing these things. Augustine doesn t altogether reject sensory perception. The senses are good and are given by God and are in part trustworthy, and they are not wholly untrustworthy certainly, but we don t know merely only through perception. There are things that are known as well innately, and Augustine will contemplate the correlation between sensory knowledge and innate knowledge, and innate knowledge relating directly to the soul. In the end, Augustine doesn t make any triumphalistic claims in this work; instead he encourages his students to study these things out for themselves, to read the skeptical philosophers, to see if their conclusions can be trusted or not. 7 of 11
I respect that, and I think it reveals a side in Augustine as a teacher who s humble, he s open to true dialogue where he can be challenged and corrected, and he s encouraging these young men to think for themselves. A third work that we move to is on divine providence, and the work is entitled Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil. This directly against the Manicheans, and it is addressing a very difficult problem of the origin of evil, and as he s thinking about the origin of evil, the whole work unfolds in an interesting way. Augustine s trying to sleep, and he hears some water in a bath, and it s bothering him, and he s wondering what s going on. Some of his students are up. and they get out. and they see that the water s making more noise than usual. And he asks them, Why is this the case? And he s thinking about religious theological philosophical ideas. He s using things in the natural order, and he s setting up an analogy to direct them into deeper thinking about things. What happens is, as they re discussing why the water s making more noise, it causes Augustine to think about natural catastrophes. One of the young boys says, The leaves are stopping up the drain, and now the water s kind of pouring through, and Augustine s thinking about a flood, and the boy s friend is saying, You know, I thought you were a skeptic, how can you be so sure about what you re saying? You see these young minds chiding one another and challenging as iron sharpens iron so the countenance of a person, his friend. As Augustine is thinking about catastrophes, calamities, evil, he sees them in two realms. There are natural catastrophes, and there are moral evils, and the two are separate. In fact, he will use natural catastrophes in a way that was used later by Thomas Aquinas as his fifth proof for the existence of God, that if things happen that are disastrous in the natural order, we can give only one of two explanations for them. They either happen by design or they don t. They have a purpose or they don t. If they don t have a purpose, we re in a world of meaninglessness. If they have a purpose, then the divine exists, and in a same way Augustine thinks about these things in this way. He does warn the students as they are talking about this not to think to man-centered, anthropocentric about natural disasters, that sometimes we can see them only from our perspective and the whole world defined as it centers around us, and we don t understand if we can t conform a disaster to our own experience, in some ways it becomes meaningless to us or something that s outside the realm of our explanation. And he says there are things that we don t understand at all. I heard an analogy of a watch that when you take a watch apart you ve got some gears going one way and some gears going another way, but they re all causing the 8 of 11
hands of the watch to turn the same way and in order. In the same way God may be spinning one wheel one way and it appears that it s going one way to us, but in fact it causing quite the counter effect. Augustine warns that one should be careful to hold these things in tension and realize that we re not all-knowing with disastrous things that are happening, providential things that are happening in our lives and the lives of others that would cause us to be slow, to give some pious, providential answer to someone who is suffering and to be respectful of God s working in a circumstance and not to be too quick to speak for God in a situation such as that. Augustine will go on then and talk about evil in the world and the origin of evil. He will talk about its relationship to divine providence. Is God, in fact, responsible for evil? How does it relate to foreknowledge? How does it relate to the world and to free will? And these are all pressing issues that are issues that are still of great interest in the history of Christian thought. The final work that we ll mention briefly at Cassiciacum is different. It s not a dialogue per se, it s a devotional that is written in the form of a dialogue, but in fact it was intended as a devotional, and so if you want to read Augustine s devotional manual just following his conversion, it s to the Soliloquies that you would turn. One can look at the Soliloquies from a lot of different perspectives, as a devotional work, for psychological importance, but we ll try to look at it briefly as a philosophical work. It begins with these marvelous prayers that we mentioned and that we ll be reflecting on now then and again in days to come. But in this work, it s Augustine not dialoguing with his students but with reason. It s kind of interesting: Erasmus later his Praise of Folly will dialogue will dialogue with folly, and we have in Proverbs wisdom, but here it s Augustine with reason, and he s arguing against himself. In the end he ll say, I never feared losing this argument because I m just arguing against myself, but it shows the kind of intellectual vulnerability that Augustine had as a teacher and as a student. In this work, he s thinking about the soul, and he s thinking about faith and the relationship between faith and learning and how does one come to know, and he s going to think in terms of Plato s analogy of the cave, the allegory, the famous allegory from The Republic where people are as if they re chained in a cave and they re looking at the back wall of the cave and behind them there s a fire blazing casting shadows on the wall in front of them. They can t turn around and see what s causing the shadows, but they see the shadows projected on the wall, and they say that looks like this and that looks like that and these perceptions become reality 9 of 11
to them. And, in fact, learning and the goal of the teacher is in some ways to break those chains and to cause one to come out from looking at the shadows of images to see things really truly as they are. And faith is the preparatory virtue that purges the soul from bodily ills and opens the eyes to wed together with reason to bring understanding, and so faith becomes a very important component in this, And he ll think about several issues that are quite contemporary in their sound. Augustine will think about existence. How do I know that I exist? And he will sound Cartesian. It will be very similar to Descartes s conclusion centuries later where Descartes doubted everything except for the fact that he existed, because in doing that would be self-denial of his ability to doubt. In the same way, Augustine would put it in a much more positive vein though as he thought about the reality of soul or self. He could not doubt the fact that he existed, and as a result he believed that these things were in some way connected with truth and were eternal and therefore God is eternal. It s a completely different direction from Descartes s conclusions. Descartes s conclusions will lead headlong into unknowing; Augustine through the virtue of faith will lead doubt of oneself to the positive virtue of the knowledge of truth which ultimately is superseded by the knowledge of God. Another thought that s anticipated in his Soliloquies will be Berkeleyan idealism. He will reject ideas that will evolve out of the Age of Reason, and they re disconnected, these thoughts, they re not carefully refined. These things are somewhat hastily written by Augustine, but nonetheless he is thinking through issues with intellectual honesty, about knowledge and learning and soul and self and faith and reason, and they re cast in this devotional work, the Soliloquies, in a dialogue between Augustine and his reason. The final works that we ll mention briefly here are works that were written while he was at Milan or Rome, and they are written afterwards, they re going to have more of a theological component. There are three major works that we would mention. One would be on the soul, and two works there, The Immortality of the Soul and On the Measure of the Soul, and the second would be on the means of learning or On Teaching is the title of the work, and finally on the free will. Briefly, let me talk about the first two and then a little more detail on the free will, and we ll draw some conclusions here, some practical conclusions about these works. Concerning the soul, the question that Augustine grappled with was what is the nature of soul. I don t have the time, the luxury of time, to go into detail about the anthropology of the early church. It was the trilogy of human existence had evolved and was accepted. The idea (and this comes out of the Greek philosophical school 10 of 11
vis-à-vis Hellenized Judaism), the idea that a person is made up of body, soul, and spirit. These might have biblical precedence, at least in a brief passage, in a benediction in Thessalonians, and some would point to Hebrews, where the sword of the Spirit is able to separate between the spirit and the soul, but an anthropology based on an Old Testament understanding and probably the wealth of material in the New Testament would hold to a kind of dualism, that spirit and soul are used interchangeably to speak of the immaterial person, and the body speaking oftentimes, but not always, of the material flesh. So this is a question that debated. It is a question that is oftentimes debated. I myself am a dualist, but Augustine had this trinity, it was an important concept to him, and he saw this trinitarian anthropology as foundational, and he ll think about soul as self and will contemplate its existence, and how do we know it exists? What does that then tell us about God? Can the soul change? Does it possess identity? How can the soul remember the past, think about the future, transcend time, and yet be the same soul and live within our body? Is it immutable or not? And how is it affected by the body? How does that affect the soul? Does it have physical characteristics to it at all? And these will be questions that the philosophical schools will be buzzing about, in particular as they relate to the origin of the soul, and we ll think about that briefly with the free will. I m going to conclude with this by inviting you with thirst of knowledge to read the assigned readings on the freedom of the will. When we come back the next time together, we ll discuss that work in greater detail, and I hope that you and I will have agreement in understanding the work and its importance. Let me conclude by pointing out some of the practical insights that we can draw from these early works of Augustine s. The first thing is to realize his growth here, realize that while these works are often overlooked and neglected, they re important because of that bridge idea of both relating to his former life and to his new life. Look at Augustine s ambition to evaluate the ideas of his own day. And finally, look at some of the practical things that he took on. Questions concerning happiness and fulfillment. How do we grow in knowledge and the faith? How do we grow in spirituality? What about the attainment of truth and the origin of evil? What about thoughts of the soul? Is the will free or not? And these are the first questions that this young convert is considering, and they re profound ones, are they not? Blessings to you with your readings, and look forward to meeting with you again. Bye-bye. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 11 of 11