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MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: St. Augustine - The Post-Augustinian Period - Severinus Boethius |
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II. THE AUGUSTINIAN PERIOD: REASON AND FAITH St. Augustine (354 - 430) The basic characteristic of Augustine's thought is that man needs reason and faith to find truth. Augustine (picture) was led to this conclusion by his personal experience. Another basic characteristic consists in his "interiority." Augustine never ceases to look inside his soul; for in the soul he finds the fundamental principles of knowledge. How do we reach these principles? Illumination is the answer of Augustine. The human soul sees the intelligibles in a certain incorporeal light as the corporeal eye sees material objects in a corporeal light. Augustine's Doctrines Augustine even after his conversion to Catholic Christianity remained a Platonist. This adherence does not signify mere acceptance; but, just as Thomas Aquinas presented the doctrine of Aristotle as the rational basis of religion, so Augustine established the teaching of Plato and the Platonists. Philosophy is considered by Augustine as the science for the solution of the problem of life; hence he is more concerned with religious and moral problems than with those of pure speculation. Theory of Knowledge For Augustine the question of knowledge involves two problems: one regarding the existence of the subject, the other regarding the origin of concepts. He resolves the first question with the famous argument: "If I doubt, I exist"; he resolves the second by appealing to illumination, i.e., the belief that the eternal truths are imparted to our soul by the Word of God. Augustine, as a Platonist, underrates sense knowledge. More about St. Augustine's Illumination. Metaphysics God: The existence of God is proved: (1) a priori, by the presence of eternal truths, which take their origin from the Eternal and Necessary Being; (2) a posteriori, by the imperfection and change of beings, a fact which presupposes a perfect and unchangeable being. Regarding the nature of God, Augustine holds that God is being, knowledge and love, the three attributes which are revealed also in every created being. Cosmology The world was created by God from nothing. With regard to the manner in which creation was effected, Augustine is inclined ti admit that in the beginning there were created a few species of beings, which, by virtue of the rationes seminales, gave origin to the other species down to the present state of the world. For Augustine "time" is founded in movement, and its reality is in the intellective memory. Psychology Augustine, as a Platonist, considers the union of the soul with the body rather extrinsic. Regarding the origin of the soul, he hesitated between creationism and traducianism, but inclined toward the latter for controversial reasons. The faculties of the soul are three: memory, intellect and will; the will is free and superior to the intellect. Along with the question of liberty, there is the problem of the presence of evil. For Augustine, evil is essentially a "privation"; the privation of a due physical perfection makes physical evil, and the privation of moral perfection makes moral evil. The cause of moral evil is neither God nor matter, but the free will, which as such is able to deviate from the right order. Suffering, whether physical or moral, is the consequence of evil. Liberty and Grace Augustine sustained a long debate against Pelagianism. Pelagius held that human nature has not been corrupted by original sin and therefore is able of itself to attain the supernatural perfection due to it. Against this heresy, Augustine defended the absolute necessity of grace in order to attain the perfection due to man. How the efficacy of grace is to be reconciled with liberty is a question which disturbed the mind of Augustine, who at times neglected liberty to uphold the necessity and efficacy of grace. Ethics Besides what has been said of free will and moral evil, it must be noted that Augustine holds the primacy of the will over the intellect. Every good work is an action of love. Politics: "The City of God" "The City of God" is a philosophical classic by which Augustine shows the history of good and evil working among mankind as a consequence of original sin and the Redemption through Jesus Christ. He wrote it while the Roman empire was falling into ruin under the barbarian invasions and the Church was rising from the imperial remains. In The Radical Academy
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The positive contributions of St. Augustine to the Perennial Philosophy St. Augustine affirms that the world was created by God from nothing, through a free act of His will. Time is a being of reason ("rens rationis") with a foundation in things which through becoming offer to the mind the concept of time as past, present, and future. Augustine affirms the absolute unity and the spirituality of the human soul. In regard to the nature of the soul he affirms that the soul is simple and immortal. Then sensitive soul, besides having the five senses, is endowed also with a sensitive cognition which is common to animals and which judges the proper object of each of the senses. The intellective soul has three functions: being, understanding, and loving, corresponding to three faculties: intellective memory, intelligence, and will. The primary among these three faculties is given to the will, which in man signifies love. The will of man is free. Three kinds of evil can be distinguished: metaphysical, physical, and moral, and each of them consists in a deficiency in being, a descent toward non-being. Metaphysical evil is the lack of a perfection not due to a given nature and hence is not actually an evil. Under this aspect, all creatures are evil because they fall short of full perfection, which is God alone. Physical evil consists in the privation of a perfection due to nature, e.g., blindness is the privation of sight in a being which ought to have sight according to the exigencies of its nature. The only true evil is moral evil; sin, an action contrary to the will of God. The cause of moral evil is not God, who is infinite holiness, nor is it matter, as the Platonists would have it, for matter is a creature of God and hence good. Neither is the will as a faculty of the soul evil, for it too has been created by God. The cause of moral evil is the faculty of free will, by which man is able to deviate from the right order, to oppose himself to the will of God. Such opposition gives moral evil reality -- negative, metaphysical reality in the sense of decadence of the order established by God, and hence decadence of being or descent toward non-being. Sin, from the very fact it is decadence of being, carries in itself its own punishment. By sinning man injures himself in his being, for he falls from what he ought to be. As a result of this fall there exist the sufferings which he must bear, such as remorse in the present life. III. THE POST-AUGUSTINIAN PERIOD The period which runs from the death of Augustine to the beginning of the ninth century is of no special interest in philosophy. The cause of this decadence can be summed up thus:
We find in this Post-Augustinian period of history an occasional individual who has a certain interest in culture and philosophy. Severinus Boethius (picture), born in Rome around 475, is such an individual. His thought is generally Platonic. He wrote four brief theological works, but his reputation at this time in history is due mainly to the translation of certain works of Aristotle which during the Middle Ages were widely used as textbooks. It was while Boethius was rigorously confined to prison, awaiting execution, that he expressed in writing his meditations of his own fate and the destiny of mankind. For years he had served as minister to King Theodoric, the Goth. He fought corruption and, as a result, aroused the hostility of man depraved dignitaries who finally succeeded in making Theodoric believe that Boethius was a traitor in the service of the Byzantine emperor. The false accusations caused Boethius to be sentenced without trial. The vicissitudes of his life led Boethius to consider the general problem of whether fortune or divine providence governed the world. His De Consolatione Philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy), which contains his thoughts while imprisoned, has been translated into almost every European language. In this work, written in dialogue form, Boethius asks of philosophy the consolations of dying wisely. It asserts that man is superior to the blind forces of nature; that the power of fortune, affecting the practical affairs of mankind, is irrelevant; and that Providence is infinite. Many persons of considerable achievement, such as Dante, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth, have found that the writings of Boethius enabled them to face life with courage and renewed confidence whenever they were beset by doubts or alarmed by the mystery of the future. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
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