Augustine "was, to a far greater degree than any emperor barbarian war lord, a maker of history and a builder of the bridge which was to lead from the old world to the new."1 He was the bridge between ancient and medieval thought and the founder of philosophy in the Middle Ages. In his passionate pursuit of truth and happiness, Aurelius Augustine’s life spiraled through three spiritual states: conversion, enlightenment, and unity.

LIFE2 AND WORKS3

He embraced the Manichean dualistic teaching that there are two ultimate principles, one responsible for good and for the human soul, the other for evil and matter, including the body.4 Dissatisfied with the materialism of Manichaeism and unable to find a basis for certitude in his experience, he adopted the skeptic attitude of the Platonic New Academy. On reading some "Platonic treatises" in the Latin translation of Victorinus, Augustine overcame his doubt about the possibility of a spiritual reality and found his way toward reconciling the presence of evil in the world with the Christian teaching of divine creation.5

- Enlightenment. Enlightened by the writings of St. Paul and the holy life of St. Anthony of Egypt, Augustine experienced a strong desire to improve his way of life. To that end he retreated for a year (3861387) with some friends to Cassiciacum outside Milan where he underwent a religious conversion and wrote Against the Academics — a justification of truth and certitude — On the Happy Life, On Order, the Soliloquies — a discourse on God and the soul — On the Immortality of the Soul, and On Music. After his spiritual seclusion, Augustine and Adeodatus were baptized by St. Ambrose.

- Union. While residing at Rome (387-388), Augustine composed two philosophical dialogues, On Free Choice and On the Magnitude of the Soul — on the operations of the soul. After returning to Tagaste (388), he sold all his inheritance and established a small monastic community. Not long after writing On the Teacher — a study of knowledge — he was ordained a priest (391), and later, by popular acclaim, was consecrated Bishop of Hippo (395/396). His numerous sermons against the Manichaeans, Donatists,6 and Pelagians,7 his many theological treatises and letters, testify to his unceasing concern for the faith of his fellow Christians.

The cultural crisis which the Roman Empire experienced during the time of Plotinus intensified in the fourth and fifth centuries as the barbarians increased their pressure on the feeble frontiers and political discontent grew among peoples subjugated by Rome. As the political and economic order deteriorated, imperial authority became more dictatorial to stabilize the empire’s vast structure, and the populace in turn lost its time1honored freedoms and civic concern. Military might rather than law bound the body politic together.

The religious element in ancient culture, which had been the inspiration of civic patriotism in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., had almost disappeared from the cosmopolitan civilization of the imperial age. The temples and gods remained, but they had lost their spiritual significance and had become little more than an ornamental appendage to public life and an occasion for civic ceremonial.8

Like Plotinus, Augustine saw that the core issue of the Roman Empire was not military, or political, or economic, but spiritual, and that the ultimate question concerns God and the soul. "God and the soul, I desire to know. Nothing more? Nothing whatever."9 Augustine added to the ancient Greek maxim, "Know thyself," to make it, "Know God and thyself."

To gain a deeper insight than ancient philosophy into the spiritual problems surrounding God and the soul, Augustine shifted the philosophical perspective from the purely natural level of Plotinus to the supernatural framework of Christian thought.11 Within this religious context, he was confronted with the relation of faith and reason: Can pure reason operate on its own or does it need faith to relate man to God? Can faith without the companionship of reason pursue wisdom?

In developing a Christian philosophy as a plan for the renewal of western thought, he centered human existence around the soul and God. Analysis of his own experience revealed three unfailing drives of existing, knowing, and willing, for being, truth, and goodness — in fine, for happiness. Within this context, philosophy is love of wisdom for the attainment of happiness.11 The soul’s unceasing search for knowledge and love is, in reality, the journey to beatitude in God. As Augustine put it in his response to God, "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."12

The quest for happiness reveals two ways of knowledge, perception and understanding. So mutable and temporal are the outer objects of the senses in the Neoplatonic world of Augustine that the soul finds it better to turn within itself to the intelligible realm where it discovers unchangeable, eternal, necessary truths in which it enjoys certitude. Since "no creature, howsoever rational and intellectual, is lighted of itself, but is lighted by participation of eternal Truth,"13 the soul finds itself illumined by God in its quest for truths.

As Augustine wandered from one philosophy to another (Manichaeanism, skepticism, and Neo-Platonism), he became personally aware of the limitations of human reason. Reason and faith need to cooperate intimately in the soul’s quest for God. Belief is natural and necessary for intellectual activity which assents to many opinions solely on another’s testimony. "We believe the things which are not present to our senses, if the evidence offered for them seems sufficient,"14 and the authority "of who may be believed is being considered."15 Religious belief and understanding are complementary: "Understand my word in order to believe, but believe God’s word in order to understand."16 Belief enlightened by understanding becomes a reasoned faith. On account of his close correlation of faith and reason, Augustine often made philosophical reflections in the course of theological inquiry and scriptural exegesis. Within this framework of philosophy and religion, Augustine’s Christian faith was open to whatever insights Greek and Roman thinkers had to offer.

Like Plato’s integration of love (eros) with wisdom (phronesis) in the pursuit of good, Augustine’s method is highly affective as well as intellective. Love moves the soul to believe and to know: "Love it is that asks, love that seeks, love that knocks, love that reveals, love, finally, that assures the permanence of what is revealed."17 Love of God brings the soul’s understanding of faith to fruition in a good life. The vision of truth is the prerogative of him who lives well, prays well, and studies well,18 for God shows himself only to one who seeks truth "piously, chastely and diligently.19 Since the wisdom of man is sanctity," it needs love inasmuch as "no good can be perfectly known unless it be perfectly loved."20

Augustine is more concerned about the person than problems of the cosmos. Augustine’s disclosure of the soul’s quest for God is highly personal in its starting point, procedure, and termination. He often begins by unfolding the evil and misery of the individual human condition to stress the need of turning to God. The Augustinian pattern of the soul’s itinerary to God advances "from the outer to the inner" forum of the soul and "from the lower to the higher"21 personal center of the Divine. The guiding principle in this far-reaching flight of the Augustinian mind is the causal relation of the mutable to the unchangeable. For instance, Augustine reasoned that immutable Truth or God is the sole sufficient reason for eternal truths in temporal human existence. Augustine’s philosophy is an I-Thou encounter between the self and God.

Augustine’s personal approach to truth is a profoundly interior way akin to the route of Plotinus. "Do not go abroad," he wrote, "return within yourself. Truth dwells in the inward man."22 The outer sensible world is changeable and uncertain. Clarity of thought, depth of understanding, and ardor of heart lie in the inner intelligible realm of the soul.

Thus admonished to return unto myself, I entered into my innermost parts under Thy guidance. I was able, because Thou didst become my helper. I entered in and saw with the eye of my soul the Immutable Light.23

 

From the vantage point of faith, Augustine took a definite stance toward Greek and Hellenistic philosophy: he rejected skepticism and Epicureanism, accepted some Stoic teachings,24 admired Aristotle as "a man of eminent abilities, yet unequal to Plato,"25 whom he extolled as "the wisest and most erudite man of his day . . ."26 Most of Augustine’s acquaintance with the essentials of Plato’s thought was via Christian Platonists and Neo-Platonists such as Plotinus who exercised an intensive and extensive influence on the content and technique of Augustine’s philosophy.27 No Father of the Church proved more courageous in Christianizing Platonism and more prudent in Platonizing Christianity than Augustine.

Like Plotinus, Augustine centered his thought around God and the soul. Whereas Plotinus reflected upon his own personal religious views, Augustine philosophized within a Christian framework. While the Plotinian mind had moved on the natural order with a rightful claim to reach the divine reality, Augustinian reason, to escape skepticism and to understand Judaeo1Christian revelation, adopted Plotinus’ interiorism and progressed inwardly and surely within the supernatural order of divine life gratuitously established by God and manifested by faith. This drive toward God came from Augustine’s indomitable desire for truth, an enthusiasm inspired by his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius.28

For Augustine, the goal of philosophy is happiness. Since man has been impressed with the natural desire for happiness,29 he philosophizes like Socrates to find happiness in the possession of truth. That is why Augustine investigated truth in its different dimensions: knowledge of truth, the existence of divine truth, created truth, love of truth, and the history of the love of truth. "O Truth, Truth — how deeply even then did the marrow of my mind long for Thee, when they sounded Thy Name to me, . . ."30 Whereas Plotinus was concerned with the unity of reality, Augustine focused on its truth.

In the Platonic tradition, Augustine held that sensation reaches only changing, temporal, contingent phenomena,31 and yields no more than opinion, whereas intellection attains unchanging, eternal necessary objects. Dreams and illusions confirm the limited value of the senses and their powerlessness in distinguishing between reality and its false images. The "judgment of truth" is the work, therefore, not of the senses, but rather of the mind.32

In view of its different objects, Augustine distinguished between inferior and superior intellection. Inferior reason is "rational knowledge of temporal things,"33 whereas superior understanding is "rational knowledge of eternal things."34 Lower reason relies on the senses in its orientation towards action, while higher reason operates independently of sensation ln its contemplation of truth. "There is a difference between the contemplation of eternal things and the action by which we use temporal things well; the former is called wisdom, the latter science."35 Augustine preferred contemplating wisdom of divine things to the scientific use of corporeal objects, though the latter is necessary for life.

If he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wishes to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know. . . . Whoever then doubts about anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, he would be unable to doubt about anything at all.36

 

- Doubting and thinking imply existence. "If you did not exist, you could not be deceived in anything."37 Briefly, "if I err, I am."38 Though a pyrrhonist were to object that "perhaps you are asleep, dreaming, even insane," nevertheless, one can still affirm, "I know that I live."39 Three things escape even illusion: "We exist and we know we exist, and we love our being and our knowledge of it. . . . Without any delusive representation, I am absolutely certain that I am, and that I know and love this."40 Since the mind, according to Augustine, grasps these truths without the intervention of the senses, its certitude cannot be invalidated by any illusions of the senses.

- Cosmological Truth. Because of the variable conditions of the senses, their objects, and the media through which both relate to each other, one must be cautious in his judgments about the world. The senses grasp what they experience and as such are never deceived. For example, if an oar is in water, it appears broken. The eyes see it exactly as they should under the circumstances, and would lie if they were to perceive it as straight. Were the mind to go beyond the sense data and affirm that reality is what appears, it would err. As long as the mind complies with the message of the senses and judges, "it appears bent to me," it expresses the truth.41

- Logical and Mathematical Truths. Logical and mathematical truths are valid independently of sense experience. Certainty regarding the logical principle of contradiction is disclosed in the analysis of two disjunctive proposition, one of which is true and the other false. For instance, "I am certain that either there is only one world or there are more worlds than one."42 One of these alternatives is surely so in reality, even though one refuses to choose between them. Whatever the state of sensible qualities, it is "necessarily true that three times three are nine, and that this is the square of intelligible numbers."43

Assurance of truth can be indirectly disclosed by refuting skepticism. To speak of the wisdom of the skeptics is a contradiction. The wise man pursues truth to attain it, whereas the skeptic teaches that man knows nothing. Yet, paradoxically, the skeptic lays claim to the title of wisdom. Would it not be wise for the skeptic to say that wisdom is impossible? How can a man be wise who is not sure whether and why he lives, and how he should live?44 It is inconsistent for the skeptic to try to live a good life as long as he is uncertain of what is good. The universal doubt of the skeptics is also contradictory. If the skeptics doubt all truths, they are certain of one truth at least, namely, their doubt. Should the skeptics retreat to the position that this one truth is probable, then they would admit at least that it is either true or false, which is none other than a disjunctive proposition in itself certain.

What makes it possible for intelligible truths to be understood? This cannot be explained by some sensible light or corporeal objects which are changeable and contingent, or by man’s mutable mind.45 If truth "were equal to our mind, it would be also mutable," but, on the contrary, it is "superior and more excellent"46 than the human mind, ruling and imposing itself on the mind’s judgments. What is superior can act on what is inferior, but not vice-versa. The traits of immutability, eternity, and necessity which characterize truth point beyond the human mind to a cause which itself is unchangeable, eternal, and necessary, and illumines the mind. "No creature, howsoever rational and intellectual, is lighted of itself, but is lighted by participation of eternal Truth."47

Not the exclusive possession of any individual human mind, truth "is present to, and offers itself in common to all men who see immutable truths, as a hidden and yet universal light."48 Consequently, there must be a universal source which enables everyone to see it simultaneously in the same way. This cause is God. As the sensible sun makes corporeal things visible to the eye, so God’s intelligible light renders the truths of science and wisdom manifest to the minds of men.49 As intelligible light, God is the interior master and teacher of the soul, illumining the minds of all teachers and students so that they can understand the same truth. "But as for all those things which we `understand’ it is not the outward sound of the speaker’s words that we consult, but the truth which presides over the mind itself from within, though we may have been led to consult it because of the words."50

Augustine appeared to be following Plotinus in using the Platonic approach to truth, namely, immutability as a clear sign of truth, and illumination as an account of this norm. He combined the Platonic idea of illumination with the Christian belief in the light which enlightens "every man who comes into the world."51 However, whereas Plotinus viewed this light as naturally due to man, Augustine insisted that it was something to which human powers alone cannot lay claim.

Augustine undoubtedly taught a theory of illumination. What he meant by it is unclear and open to various interpretations ranging from passivity to activity on the part of the human mind.52 On the spectrum of theories, emphasis on the causality of God varies inversely with stress on the causality of man.

- Theory of Activo-Passivity. To respect Augustine’s doctrine of illumination, due consideration must be given to both the passive and active character of the human mind. Augustine was impressed by the necessary, immutable, and eternal character of judgments of purely intelligible truth. He realized that truth could not be accounted for either by the objects experienced or the mind pondering them. Appeal to internal or external experience to account for the content of concepts about the corporeal world cannot explain the necessity of the concept. To make judgments of eternal things, for example, "beauty is one," the mind needs to be immediately regulated by the light of eternal and necessary rules of divine wisdom, without adverting to the light itself.53 The theory of regulation, which recognizes both the human mind’s activity in judging and its passivity in being governed by divine norms, seems to be more consonant with Augustine’s teaching as a whole.

Divine Truth54

Certain of truth, Augustine sought to know truth itself, God, according to the following metaphysical principles. First, reality is ultimately being. Everything is real insofar as it is what it is, namely, essence, or in Platonic terminology, form. Second, everything is essentially what it is inasmuch as it is true; truth is the basis of its essence.55 Here, Augustine has in mind truth as it is found originally in God. Third, everything which is essentially true is also one and good. Whatever is evil is without unity, truth, and essence.56 In view of this principle, Augustine can refute the Manichaean reification of an ultimate evil cause. Finally, Augustine, in authentic neoplatonic fashion, reasoned that beauty, like goodness, flows from the order, harmony and proportion of unity.57

On the basis of these principles, Augustine distinguished a triple hierarchy of being according to the degree of mutability and/or immutability.58 The essence of bodies, spatially and temporally mutable, is the lowest level of being. Souls, unchangeable as regard place but mutable in time, are on a higher metaphysical plane. The essence of God, immutable both in place and time, is the highest nature.59 In this hierarchy, truth, unity, goodness, and beauty are in proportion to a being’s immutability. Within this hierarchy, the more perfect can act on the less perfect but not vice versa.

A finite mind cannot comprehend infinite being. God comprehended is not God. When one utters "`Unspeakable,’. . . there arises a curious contradiction of words, because if the unspeakable is what cannot be spoken of, it is not unspeakable if it can be called unspeakable."60 The wisest man is he who best knows his ignorance of God in the mystery of silence. Yet "if anything worthy of praise is noticed in the nature of things, whether it be judged worthy of slight praise or of great, it must be applied to the most excellent and ineffable praise of the Creator."61

- Negative-Positive Predication. Augustine adopted Plotinus’ double theology of negative and positive predication. Because the infinite transcends all finite categories and concepts, it is easier to know what God is not than to know what he is. Though "nothing said of God is said with complete conformity,"62 one speaks exactly in saying both what God is and what he is not, in affirming God "as good without quality, great without quantity, . . . being without passion."63 Names, such as wisdom and love, must be profoundly transformed before they can be applied to God. What these names signify must be purged of every shadow of mutability and temporality in a negative process and then raised to an eminent degree (perfect wisdom, perfect love) in an affirmative movement. Though "everything can be said of God, yet nothing is worthy of being said of God."64

- Gnoseological Proof. His favorite proof is nothing but the epistemological justification of knowledge of truth now understood as a philosophical verification of faith in God. How can truths which immanently regulate the mind be adequately explained? Augustine found more in intellectual knowledge than the human mind can sufficiently account for. The mutable mind which errs in knowing things other than they are, increases its knowledge, and ceases to know, cannot be the sufficient reason of truths which as necessary cannot be otherwise than they are, and as immutable cannot increase or decrease. Consequently, the truths upon which the mind depends transcend it and find their raison d’ être only in necessary, unchangeable, and eternal Truth itself. God is "the Truth in whom and by whom and through whom those things are true which are true in every respect."65 A judgment is true, therefore, because Truth or God is.

- Cosmological Proof. In reading the great book of the world, one is moved to "question the beautiful earth. . . . the beautiful sea . . . the beautiful air . . . the beautiful heavens, . . . ."66 to "question the living creatures, . . ."67 And they reply, "We are not God, but it is God who has made us."68 As works of art point to the artist, so "everything cries out to you of its author; nay, the very forms of created things are as it were the voices with which they praise their Creator."69 Listening with the mind and heart, one will hear "the very order, disposition, beauty, change and motion of the world and of all visible things silently proclaim that it could only have been made by God, whose greatness and beauty, are unutterable and invisible."70 What participates in being, unity, truth, goodness and beauty, is not its own cause but an effect of unparticipating being. Creatures have truth, because "O Truth, You . . . truly are."71

In his revelation to Moses, God affirmed, "I am who am (Yahweh)."72 In line with other Christian thinkers, Augustine interpreted this name to mean that God’s fundamental perfection is being. "Everything that is in God is being."73 Thus, Augustine rejected Plotinus’ subordination of being to the One by identifying unity with being. God who is the truth and goodness that he has, radically differs from creatures who merely have what they possess.74 As being itself, God is essential or absolute perfection, whereas creatures which are not being itself are relative perfection. God is "primary good, the good of all goods, the good whence all goods come, the good without which nothing is good, and the good which is good for other things . . ."75 All God’s perfections are identical in his utter simplicity. "For God, to be is the same as to be strong, or to be just, or to be wise, and to be whatever else you may say of that simple multiplicity, or that multiple simplicity, whereby His substance is signified."76

- Immutable Spirit. As supreme being, God enjoys the attributes of spirituality, immutability, eternity, and immensity. He who is must be supreme spirit,77 without matter and composition, otherwise he would possess nonbeing and be just another essence. As truth which necessarily is and cannot be other than what it is, the divine spirit is immutable. "Thou shall change things and they shall be changed, but Thou are always the same."78 Only what has matter or potentiality can receive a new form of being and become what it was not. The fullness of being, God enjoys perfect self-identity and has no need of becoming what he necessarily is, being itself.79

- Eternity. From God’s immutability flows his eternity. The Immutable cannot come to be in the future nor cease to be in the past. Abiding truth dwells in the incorruptible present. "Analyze the changes in things and you will find it was and it will be; think of God and you will find He is; no was or will be has a place there."80 Time is the process of the mutable, whereas eternity is the duration of the unchangeable. As eternal, God is ever ancient and ever new.

- Immensity. Immutable spirit is not restricted in power or presence: "God is Himself in no interval nor extension of place, but in His immutable and pre1eminent might is both interior to everything because all things are in Him, and exterior to everything because He is above all things."81

- Wisdom. Perfect truth in his essence, God possesses all the possible forms as ideas. "Ideas are the primary forms, or the permanent and immutable reasons of real things; . . . they are contained in the divine intelligence . . . and it is by participation in these that whatever exists is produced. . . ."82 Nothing is real or intelligible unless it is ultimately grounded in the divine ideas. Fully conscious of his essence, God comprehends the totality of his being and eternally intuits past, present, and future things. Consequently, he is all-wise, or omniscient.

- Will. All God knows in "one, eternal, immutable and ineffable vision,"83 he wills in a present without past or future. God sees and wills, or if one prefers the human viewpoint, foresees and forewills even the free acts of men, so that when we pray to him God knows beforehand "what, and when we should ask Him, and to whom He would listen or not listen, and on what subjects."84 Wisdom and will in God who is the unity of truth and goodness, are one.

- Trinity. From faith in Christian revelation, Augustine affirmed that God is a Trinity of three divine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Augustine’s Trinity of three equal persons who are one in being radically differs from Plotinus’ triad of three unequal hypostases — One, Nous or Mind, and Soul — which are successively subordinate. However, Augustine borrowed heavily from Plotinus in striving to understand the Trinity. The Father is being in his own right. The Son is the eternal, living thought or Word of the Father, his self-knowledge, his perfect image. For Augustine, the divine ideas are contained, not in an inferior Plotinian Mind, but in the Word or Son who is consubstantial with the Father.85 The love of the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit, goodness itself. The love of supreme wisdom in perfect being, God enjoys the highest beatitude.

- Expressions. As art testifies to the artist, so all creatures resemble their maker, the divine Trinity. Unity (measure), form (number), and order (weight) in all creatures reflect their creator. Object, vision, and attention of the mind are traces in sensation of their maker. Memory, understanding, and will are images in intellection of the Trinity.86 All analogies fall short of expressing divine truth, "for what is thought of God is truer than what is said, and His being is truer than what is thought."87

Among the myriad possible expressions of the divine ideas which God contemplates, he freely wills some immutable intelligible forms to be reflected outwardly, though imperfectly, in changeable forms with varying degrees of being and order.88 The resulting hierarchy of essences, grounded in their unequal participations in the divine ideas, mirrors the creator’s mind. As being itself independent of other things, "God, however, is a debtor to no one since He confers everything gratuitously."89 Augustine favored the Christian belief in God’s free creation of the temporal world over Plotinus’ doctrine of necessary and eternal emanation. Motivated by pure love with nothing to gain or lose, God chose to share a measure of his goodness with creatures. Lest they slip back to nothingness from which they were liberated, the creative act conserves them in being. "If He should withdraw this activity from creatures, we would not live, nor be moved, nor be."90

- Creation from Nothing. Since God’s being is power itself in absolute independence of all things and forces, he created the entire being of the universe from nothing, with no need of pre-existing matter, as was the case with Plato’s Demiurge. "You (God) did not create the universe in the universe, for there was no place wherein to make it before it was made to be. Nor did you hold anything in your hand wherewith to make heaven and earth."91 Nothing comes from nothing except by the unlimited power of God which can make the total being of the universe, both its matter and form.

- Matter. Created matter is "almost nothing," though not completely nothing,"92 a minimum of reality between being and nonbeing, the least reflection of divine truth. Formless matter, which seems to be impervious to knowledge, does not exist except with form. Though anterior to form in the order of causality, matter is concomitant with it in time. Indefinite in itself, matter becomes determinate being by its form, as sound is made a meaningful word by articulation of the voice.93 Matter and form, it seems, were created simultaneously. Matter was first endowed with a capacity for the form of the ideas and then immediately perfected with being by an inchoative form of number, order and beauty. Shifting unceasingly from one form to another, matter is the matrix of mutability, the substrate of change.94

- Time. Temporality follows in the wake of mutable matter. In this sense, time began only with the creation of the universe. That is why it is more exact to say that the world was created with time rather than in time as if time preceded creation. Eternity is the duration of immutable being, whereas temporality is the duration of a changing being having a before, a fleeting now, and an after.95 Time is basically the present interval "which cannot be divided into even the minutest moments . . . and flies so rapidly from the future into the past that it does not extend over the slightest instant."96 In the moving series of indivisible moments, no creature is co-eternal with the creator in the permanency of its eternity. Were a creature eternal, it would undergo no change, and, consequently, have neither a past nor future, but simply exist in the present. Then it would no longer be a creature; it would be immutable being with eternal duration. Such existence belongs only to God.

"What, then, is time?" Augustine asked. "If no one asks me, I know; but if I want to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."97 He finds himself familiar with the use of such terms as "past," "present," and "future," but hard put to define time. He was impressed by its mental character rather than by its objective appearance as something "out there." Time is a mental phenomenon, a "stretching-out of the soul" in its measurement of motion that was and is and will be. Without this distention, the soul could not perceive and measure the duration of motion. Past is the soul’s memory which retains and remembers what was; the future is its expectation of what will be; and the present is its attention to what is.98 Past and future coexist in the continuity of the soul’s present attention which alone really exists. Even after his impressive analysis of time, Augustine still feels uncertain about the nature of time.99 Transitory phenomena find stability in the soul.

- Spiritual Matter. Augustine interpreted the creation of "heaven" and "earth" as described in the Scriptures to mean invisible and visible matter. To explain how spiritual creatures such as angels and probably the human soul differ from the divine spirit, he posited in their essence an invisible or spiritual matter as their mutable substrate. This special kind of matter is not quantitative like the extension of physical bodies. Unlike other creatures which are temporal, these angelic spirits enjoy the duration of a being changeable by nature but immutably stabilized and united to God in beatific contemplation.100 Theirs is a closer reflection than time of eternity.

- Seminal Reasons. If everything was created simultaneously, how could Augustine account for the continual appearance of new beings? He theorized that creatures existed in two states, one perfect and the other imperfect. Whereas the four elements and man’s soul were created in a state of mature form,101 other things were made in an imperfect condition as seminal forms. The primordial seeds of all living things, including Adam’s body, account for the new beings continually appearing in the universe.102 In the beginning of creation, fully formed things were visible and actual, but those seminally preformed were produced "invisibly, potentially, causally, as future things which have not been made."103 As conditions became favorable under God’s providence, the inner, efficacious forces latent in the humid seminal reasons gradually fructified and openly appeared in the full light of creation, like the unfolding of a rosebud.

- Number. Augustine interpreted the Stoic and Plotinian theory of seminal reasons within a Platonic perspective of number. Number is the source of perfection in forms and the cause of development in seminal reasons. From the number-forms flow the universal order of parts within wholes, the order of unities well disposed in space, and the order of seminal reasons developing successively in time.104 As number begins from one and ends in an integer, so the hierarchy of mutable unities originates from and tends toward the supreme one, God. In his mathematical vision, Augustine viewed God’s providence and rule as ordering all things according to measure, number, and weight.105

In his opposition to Manichaeism, Augustine faced the problem of reconciling the reality of evil with an all-good creator. God who as sovereign good can create nothing but what is good. Hence, every substance is naturally good. However, when a creature lacks measure, form, and order, its nature is vitiated and evil.106 Because evil "falls away from essence and tends to not-being . . . to non-existence,"107 it is said to have in itself no essence. That is why the Manichaean conception of evil existing by itself is meaningless. As a privation of good, evil cannot be caused by God. "No one, therefore, need seek for an efficient cause of an evil will. Since the `effect’ is, in fact, a `deficiency’ the cause should be deficient."108 Analogously, silence and darkness have no cause as do sound and light. Evil arises from the deficiency of creatures, their mutability and sharing in non-being.109 Augustine, therefore, adapted Plotinus’ conception of evil as a privation without following his tendency to equate matter with evil.

- Physical Evil. The question arises as to whether it would have been better to create nothing at all rather than a world of physical and moral evils. From the natural limitation of creatures comes the physical evil of suffering, anguish, and catastrophes. In Augustine’s view, such privations find meaning in the beauty and goodness of the universe as a whole, as darkness looks to light for purpose. If pain humbles one in repentance and lifts the heart to God for love and courage, it serves a good purpose. Death, tragic as it appears, plays a main role in the drama of the universe for the person aspiring to be with God. As syllables and sounds pass away to allow other words to be born and yet form the well-ordered whole of beautiful speech, so creatures and the evil they work upon each other find meaning in the good of creation as a whole.110 The whole gives meaning to the part. For Augustine, it is better to be in this world of chiaroscuro with good standing out brightly against the darkness of evil than not to be at all.

- Moral Evil. No doubt recalling his own sin, Augustine was deeply concerned with the reason for God’s creating peaceable wills which can voluntarily turn away from supreme goodness. He viewed moral evil as the privation of right order in a created will which, while remaining good as will, lacks the measure, form, and order it ought to have.111 When a created will abuses its freedom and voluntarily defects from supreme goodness, it is deprived of right order. Good in itself, the will can be good for man, if he wills it so.112 The abuse of free will by no means denigrates its value. In his wisdom and power, God’s providence inscrutably makes moral evil serve the universal harmony by drawing good out of evil and transforming the sinner into a work worthy of God. Without justifying sin, this service of evil to good verifies in large measure God’s creation of human freedom as a value personally imaging God in himself.

In his reconciliation of scriptural texts, Augustine understood Ecclesisticus as referring to the simultaneous creation of everything, including the first man’s body and soul, and Genesis as narrating God’s development of the seminal reasons to bring the bodies of Adam and Eve to their mature state.113

Augustine encountered more acute difficulties in trying to explain the origin of the first man’s descendants. The difficulty is not so much with the formation of the human body which evidently developed from seminal reasons to its present finished form, but with the mode and time of the soul’s creation. As regards the origin of the soul, Augustine investigated the theories of creationism and traducianism. Creationism, the view that God immediately creates each soul at the moment it comes to animate the body, faces the difficulty of explaining how original sin can be transmitted from Adam to his descendants. Traducianism answers this problem by holding that the souls of all people to come are seminally formed with the creation of the first human soul of Adam; accordingly, parents "hand down" or generate, under God’s influence, the incorporeal souls of their offspring by a sort of spiritual emanation, "as light is lit by another light, so that without detriment to the latter, the former light comes from it."114 Augustine seemed to prefer traducianism as more probable than creationism.

For Augustine, "a soul in possession of a body does not constitute two persons but one man."115 So intimate is the unity of body and soul that "anyone who wishes to separate the body from human nature is foolish,"116 for neither alone is truly man. Within a Platonic perspective, Augustine defined man as "a rational soul with a mortal and earthly body in its service."117 Man is primarily a soul for whom the body is an instrument. As superior, the soul acts on the body by vivifying and moving it without being moved by it. The inferior cannot determine the superior. By its constant and pervasive "vital attention," the soul is present entirely in every part of the body as a whole and also totally in each part.118 Experience of what is going on in any part of the body testifies to this presence. In this mysterious union, the soul mediates between the body it unifies, informs, and orders, and the divine ideas which animate it.

- Substance. "When the mind knows itself, it knows its own substance."119 In reflecting upon himself, man discloses himself as a continuing center of activities: "I remember that I have memory, understanding, and will; and I understand that I understand, will, and remember; and I will that I will, and remember, and understand; . . ."120 These acts belong to man, but he is more than them. His true ego is the soul, subsisting in its own right, "a certain kind of substance, sharing in reason, fitted to rule the body."121 As an independent superior substance, the soul presides over a dependent inferior body.

- Incorporeality. Augustine reasoned to the nature of the soul from its activities and objects. The human soul could not understand immutable, eternal truths transcending space and time unless it itself has some affinity with these intelligible objects in their incorporeality.122 The fact that the soul can retain representations of past sensible objects in present images indicates that it is beyond bodily restrictions. If the soul were extended and consequently localized exclusively in that region of the body to which it is attending, for example, vision, it would not be able to animate the body as a whole.123

- Immortality. As the subject of indestructible truth, the soul must be naturally imperishable.124 Like knows like. Participating essentially in the divine idea of life, the soul cannot die. A dead soul is a contradiction. Neither can it be destroyed by error, though it diminishes in perfection as it falls from truth.125 Life in itself, the soul is not life of itself, since it receives being from God and is kept from falling into nothingness by his sustaining power.

- Memory. Memory is "the present of things past"126 in the soul which can recall what has taken place. Self-awareness occurs in memory: "There also I do meet with myself and recall myself: what, when and where I did something, and how I felt when I did it."127 The soul also remembers by learning immutable truths from God as the inner master who is present as light within memory and illumines the truths precontained therein. In this way memory reaches beyond the past to what is eternally present.128 Augustine, therefore, grounded Plato’s theory of knowledge as remembering in divine illumination.

- Mind. Coexisting with memory in the soul is the mind which as superior reason contemplates eternal, intelligible realities, and as inferior reason knows temporal, sensible things.129 These two offices are discharged by the single mind. In the light of divine truth, the mind makes true judgments expressing necessary truths.

- Free Will. Willing is as inescapable a psychological fact as remembering and understanding. Man experiences the will to exist and to think. This willing reveals itself as free in its ability to choose or not to choose something. Free to acquire or to retain a thing, man finds himself responsible for what he chooses, a "fact which the shepherds proclaim on the mountains, the poets in the theaters, the unlearned in social intercourse, the wise men in libraries, the masters in the schools, the priests in the holy places and the human race throughout the whole world."130 Man can be blamed or punished for doing what it is possible not to do.

The will enjoys power over the whole life of the soul: its feelings of fear and joy, its sensing of an object, its conjoining or disjoining of images in the imagination, and its moving the understanding to search or to know something.131 The will’s ultimate power lies not in its dominion over other things, but in its mastery over itself, its ability to control its own choosing.132

- Image of God. The closest, noblest, and clearest image of the divine Trinity is the human trinity of self-memory, self-understanding, and self-love. "Well, then, the mind remembers itself, understands itself, and loves itself; if we discern this, we perceive a trinity, not yet God indeed, but now finally an image of God."133

- Sense Powers. Since the more perfect cannot be determined by the less perfect — the spiritual by the material — the soul cannot be acted upon by the body. The soul does not undergo sensation but rather is the subject of that activity.134 After the soul is conscious of bodily impressions made by corporeal objects on the sensory organs, it responds by producing out of its own substance, a spiritual image in which things are perceived.135 "When we see a body and its image begins to exist in our soul, it is not the body that impresses the image in our soul. It is the soul itself that produces it with wonderful swiftness within itself."136 The soul then compares and unifies the images as its own, elaborates on them in the imagination, and retains them in the treasury of sense memory. Sensation, then, is an incorporeal activity of the soul using the body and its impressions as instruments. The prominence of the soul as the proper subject of sensation is due to the Platonic influence in Augustine.

love is the dynamic center of man’s moral life. As weight makes a physical body naturally tend upward or downward, so love moves man where it will: "My weight is my love; by it I am borne wherever I am carried."137 Love motivates man toward good or the evil he thinks good. It belongs to the essence of human existence. "If you are to love nothing, you will be lifeless, dead, detestable, miserable."138 Man thinks, remembers, senses, acts, and lives for what he loves.

- Charity. "Love, but be careful what you love,"139 for as a man loves, so he is. A good love makes him good, his anger just, his desire holy, his joy blessed, his fear salutary.140 To love rightly is to live rightly, whereas to love badly is to live wrongly. Love finds its highest fulfillment in loving what ought to be loved above all things, God, the greatest good, and man, the noblest participation in the sovereign good.141 Because "God is love," (I John 4:8), "Thou hast formed us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee."142 Love of God above all and all in God is charity. Thus the parallel which Plato had drawn between love (eros) and wisdom (phronesis) was integrated by Augustine and subordinated to his higher comparison between charity and faith-with-understanding.

Every act of love is naturally a pursuit of happiness.143 Even evil is sought with the expectation of some sort of happiness. The outer man drinks only at the fountain of changeable, temporal creatures and finds but an impermanent and insecure happiness. "For whoever follows after what is inferior to himself, becomes himself inferior. But every man is bound to follow what is best."144 Not in Stoic virtue which can be lost, but in the immutable source of all virtue lies true joy. Authentic happiness can be found in the inner man who turns his heart and mind to the divine giver of all being and all delight.145

Dissatisfaction with the deficiency and emptiness of human existence leads the soul to find the fulfillment of all its desires in God, the fullness of truth and goodness. Again, "thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee."146 Not in an image but in the reality of unparticipating good the mind finds rest in truth itself and the will quietude in Good itself, in God alone who is immutable and eternal happiness. "The striving after God is the desire of happiness; to reach God is happiness itself."147 That is why man ought to love God whole-heartedly: "If God is man’s supreme good . . . it clearly follows, since to seek the chief good is to live well, that to live well is nothing else but to love God with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the mind."148

Happiness comes to perfection in eternity where truth itself now dimly glimpsed is seen clearly, face to face. The intellect sees God and love embraces him. Contemplation is the indispensable condition for attaining sovereign truth, and love constitutes the essence of this possession.149 In perfect contemplative love of God, the soul is beatified with complete "joy in the truth."150

In Augustine’s Christian perspective, man can neither pursue nor possess perfect happiness unless he receives grace, or divine life, from God. What he found lacking in Plotinus to account for the movement of a weak and wavering will of fallen man to good, he derived from the teaching of St. Paul on the necessity of grace from God to love God. Augustine opposed the view of Pelagius who held that man’s own efforts could bring him to a higher life. Decisive in Augustine’s personal history was the discovery of his inability to overcome sin without God’s grace and the experience of his success in doing so with divine help. "When man tries to live justly by his own strength without the help of the liberating grace of God, he is then conquered by sins; but in free will he has it in his power to believe in the Liberator and to receive grace."151 Man can deform God’s image within himself, but only God can bridge the gulf between temporal, mutable being and eternal, unchangeable divinity to restore man to grace.

At this stage, Augustine encountered the formidable problem of reconciling grace with human freedom. How can the will be free if it needs grace to be moved toward what is good? Since grace strengthens man’s will to do good, it perfects human liberty. Foreseeing the circumstances in which any free will would consent or dissent, God influences the will to consent infallibly to grace without removing its freedom.152 Grace draws the will to its purpose by offering delight as an incentive to which it consents just as freely as it would to the pleasure of sin if grace were lacking.153 Human liberty is guaranteed on the part of man because "it is within each man’s will to consent to the call from God or to resist it,"154 and on the part of God whose eternal truth is the ground of the will’s freedom.

The problem for Augustine, is not between grace and free choice, but between grace and liberty. All liberty is free choice, but every free choice is not liberty. Genuine liberty is free choice used to good purpose, whereas unauthentic liberty is its bad use. In both cases, free choice is operative.155 Only God’s grace can liberate free choice from the slavery of sin, and preserve and promote human liberty. "Free will is more free as it is more healthy; it is more healthy the more subject it is to the grace of the divine mercy."156 The soul, completely confirmed in the grace of the beatific vision, enjoys perfect liberty: "What would be more free than free will if it were able not to serve sin?"157

Moved by grace, free will attains authentic liberty in fulfilling the law of God. All men are more or less conscious of moral laws. Though expressed in different ways, basic norms such as "Seek wisdom and happiness," "Subordinate the inferior to the superior," and "Give everyone his due," are common to all people, and applied to human actions by conscience under the influence of God’s moral light.158 These first principles of morality, like those of the speculative order, are not of man’s own making, but are grounded in eternal truths.

- Eternal Law. "The eternal law is the divine reason, or the will of God, ordaining the preservation of the order of nature and forbidding its disturbance."159 Because "it is the law by which it is just that everything should have its due order,"160 it demands universal order and necessity, binding all creatures — natural things naturally, free things freely — to observe its prescripts. Within this universal order, the divine will obliges the human will to preserve due order by subordinating the lower to the higher,161 external goods to the body, the body to the soul, the senses to reason, and reason to God.162 In the proper ordering of human existence, love of God is the main motivating force in the will’s fulfillment of its moral obligation.

- Natural Law. The expression of the eternal law in creation is the natural law which is concreted with creatures. As the image of God and participating in his being, the human soul is inscribed with his eternal law, "as the impression of a ring passes into wax, yet does not leave the ring."163 What God had inwardly written in men’s consciences and they had refused to read, he outwardly promulgated as the ten commandments to the Israelites. Dictates of right conscience and acts of just legislation governing people express in particular ways the one natural law which remains the same as its applications change to meet various needs and situations.164

Fulfillment of the divine law adorns the soul with the beauty of virtue. As the eternal law is the work of divine reason and will, so virtue is the effect of human reason reigning in ethical existence and the will wanting it to rule.165 "Virtue is the love by which one loves that which should be loved,"166 whereas vice is the love of moral evil. As a consequence of love’s submission to the order of the eternal law, a man lives virtuously; thus virtue is "the art of living well and rightly."167 Augustine, therefore, overcame the static Stoic conception of virtue as apathy by viewing virtue as love and by ordering the whole person with emotions toward God.

Because of its weakness, the human will is incapable of pursuing good without an illumination of the divine virtues. The will is rectified by participating in the immutable rules and lights of the virtues dwelling eternally within the divine truth common to all men.168 As God illumines physical bodies by numbers and the mind by truth, so he illumines the will by virtue.

The virtues find their unity in love. Whereas vice is the ugly visage of disorderly love, virtue is the beauty of true love ordered toward God.169 Love is the highest virtue to which all others are reducible. Temperance, for example, is a love which moves the soul wholly to prefer the lasting beauty and purer joy of God to the passing beauty and inferior pleasures of the body. From love flows liberty: "love and do what you will."170 The measure of one’s love of God is to love him without measure.

Society emerges from love. Love of a common good brings people together into a society. Accordingly, society is "an assemblage of rational beings associated in a common agreement as to the things it loves."171 Love of a common goal is the social bond of people. A society is good as long as its love is good. Besides the family, the basic natural and social unit,172 love has given rise to two great societies, State and Church.

A State is a group of people united in their natural love of mutable, temporal goods necessary for human life, of which peace is the most lofty and inclusive.173 Dishonorable nations such as Assyria and Rome waged war for the sake of war,174 whereas honorable men do battle with the hope for a true and just peace. "The peace of all things is the tranquillity of order," the harmonious life of body and soul, "the ordered harmony of authority and obedience" in the family and the political community, and the "perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God."175

- Authority. The authority to command obedience to civil laws and unify members of the State should be in the hands of the most capable citizens whom Cicero described as "best by nature itself."176 The ultimate source of legitimate authority is the author of nature who "gives kingly power on earth both to the pious and impious."177 The ruler should legislate for the common good by promulgating just laws rightly reflecting the natural law. A just law ought to be obeyed as coming from God, whereas an unjust law should be disobeyed as deriving from a wicked will.178 Effective legislation requires coercive power to prevent disorder. The offender of a just law should be "corrected by word or blow or some kind of just and legitimate punishment, such as society permits for his own good, to readjust him to the peace he has abandoned."179 The success of authority should be measured not so much in its advancement of worldly prosperity as in its promotion of justice and obedience to God.180

Augustine went beyond Plato’s concern for man as a citizen of the State. Christians are members of the Church, a spiritual society, as well as of a temporal State. Out of love for man, Jesus Christ made the Church in the likeness of his Father: "God is Father and the Church Mother."181 As the spiritual mother of souls, the Church teaches her children the truths of Christ and dispenses through the sacraments the grace they need to live what they believe. Because the Church "Holds and possesses all the power of her Spouse the Lord,"182 she can legislate, judge, and administer in matters of faith and morals.183 The Church is a society of people loving according to the same faith, bound together by their common love of the same God and the same beatitude.

- Church and State. As the Church is perfect and sovereign in the spiritual order of peace and salvation, so the State is in the corporeal order of peace and harmony. With each having its own rights and laws, opposition is unnecessary as long as one does not interfere in the other’s affairs. The Christian citizen owes obedience to both societies out of love of God who willed them.184 The intimate intermingling of spiritual and temporal interests of Christians requires a close collaboration between religious and civil authority.185 The State ought to make its natural end serve the higher goal of the Church. In return, the State will be leavened with the yeast of Christian truth, love and holiness, and remade in the image of Christ.

History of Two Loves186

In his City of God, Augustine found history to be a tale of two cities. Societies are what they love. Love of the uncreated good constitutes the city of God, whereas love of created goods establishes the city of creatures. "Two loves make these two cities."187 On the one hand, the common love of temporal things in preference to God unites bad angels and men into the city of slavery and sin. On the other, the common love of the eternal God and his law above creatures binds all good angels and men into the city of liberty and holiness. Both cities are immanent yet transcend time and space. The head of the city of God is Christ and its citizens are all those elect angels and people -- Abel, Noah, saints — who freely submit to God’s grace and are, consequently, predestined to enjoy eternal happiness in heaven. Heresiarch in the city of sin is Satan and its denizens are all the reprobate souls — perhaps, Cain — and all who freely reject God’s grace and are doomed to suffer unending punishment in hell. The history of creation from its dawn to its dusk is a tale of these two cities.

Although the people of these two cities intermingle in the family and State, they remain spiritually different. "You have heard and know that there are two cities, for the present mingled together in body, but in heart separated."188 The heavenly wheat and earthly cockle commingle in the field of life, but at the harvest time of judgment day they will be separated by the winnowing fan of God’s justice which will render to each his due according to his love.189

These morally distinct cities are not identified with either the Church or the State, each of which contain both future elect and reprobate souls. Were the State coincident with the city of Satan, no good Christian could be a servant of the State as well as of the Church.190 However, the sacred spirit of the heavenly city permeates to a high degree the Church, and the secular attitude of the earthly city pervades the State. Since the State in itself is naturally indifferent to supernatural ends, it can be aptly defined as a "human society organizing itself apart from God,"191 as the history of Babylon and Rome bears out. As Christ’s plenipotentiary on earth, the Church uniquely embodies the city of God, aspiring unceasingly after the eternal good of heaven and working tirelessly for the establishment of God’s kingdom.192

Augustine’s City of God was also a defense of Christianity against those pagans who blamed it for the decay of the Roman Empire. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was due not to Christianity, but to the Romans themselves who abandoned their traditional natural virtues and high ideals and deteriorated in their conquests for power, wealth and pleasure. The mission of Christianity is not to revive the old city of Rome with its material splendor, but to build up the membership of the new heavenly city of Jerusalem with spiritual glory. To this high purpose, Christian martyrs suffered and died; Christian soldiers patriotically fought in defense of their nation; Christian citizens forgave their offenders, just as the pagans Sallust and Cicero taught pardon; Christian ascetics did penance for the sins of the Romans. So runs the refutation of those "who prefer their own gods to the Founder of the Holy City,"193 Jesus Christ.

Augustine sounded Plotinian and Platonic themes, but the philosophical symphony is his own. Once the conceptual elements of Plotinus are assimilated by the Augustinian mind, they assume an altogether new form and become an integral part of this new synthesis. Priceless concepts of ancient philosophy rise anew, as a phoenix from the ashes, and live again the Christian thought of Augustine. Later in life, Augustine regretted his youthful avidity for Platonic ideas which he modified.194 What the ancient philosophers grasped in a limited and obscure knowledge about God as the goal of life and the way to him, Augustine found with certainty and clarity in the one, true wisdom of Christianity.195 Augustine Hellenized Christian ideas, or, to put it in an Augustinian perspective, he Christianized the Hellenic thought he encountered.

The unity of philosophy and religion in Augustine’s life found expression in a method which integrated both faith and reason in one vision of a single supernatural goal. Limited to the one eye of natural reason, Plato and Plotinus could not grasp man in his concrete existence as actually fallen yet redeemed and destined by the grace of Christ for union with God. As ancient philosophy testifies to the capacity of pure human reason, so Augustine’s new wisdom bears witness to the power of faith-with-reason in disclosing the meaning of human existence. In view of his integral method of a reasoning faith, it is not surprising that Augustine conceived Christian philosophy as both the true philosophy and the true religion.196

Therefore, the mere presence in man’s mind of a datum which obviously transcends man implies the existence of its object. This deep-seated tendency to find in God alone sufficient reason for the idea we have of Him, is the bond which links the metaphysics of Saint Anselm, Saint Bonaventure, Duns Scotus and Descartes to Augustinian metaphysics.197

- God. Within an essentialist context, Augustine’s all-pervading purpose was to guarantee God’s absolute transcendence by emphasizing the creature’s complete dependence on him. The theory of illumination validates truth and virtue on the basis of an immutable being transcending time and change. With a synthetic sweep, Augustine combined epistemology, theology and ethics in a single answer to problems of knowledge, virtue and God. Though his doctrine of illumination guarantees a maximum dependence of the soul on God in the acts of knowing and willing, it is not clear and precise, as different interpretations testify. Furthermore, how can a created soul share in uncreated immutable light and truth without the latter becoming changeable in the human mind?198

Without compromising God’s transcendence, Augustine attempted to explain his creative and providential activity in the cosmos and history according to the doctrine of exemplarism. However, his revised Plotinian exemplarism is heir to the difficulties inherent in Platonic metaphysics. For example, he left unclear whether God, in creating matter — viewed in a Platonic way as a quasi nonbeing — created being.199 Whereas Plotinus envisaged divine freedom as the priority of the One over being and regarded the emanation of the many from the One as necessary, Augustine viewed the divine essence as eternally free to exemplify ideal essences in creating things. Augustine’s conception of God will become the common heritage of practically all medieval philosophers.

- Causality. Nowhere is the power of God over creatures so clearly drawn as in Augustine’s doctrine of causality. Divine causality — the efficient causality of God’s creative power, the exemplary causality of his truth, and the final causality of his goodness — holds hegemony over the created causality of seminal forms,200 and the purely passive causality of matter. No created agent can introduce new forms into nature which God created with all its actual and seminal forms. Whatever causality creatures exert in providing favorable conditions for the production of formal perfections appears at most to be an uncovering of effects implanted by God in the seminal reasons. This minimizing of the creature’s causality for the maximum glory of the creator will remain a guiding principle for the followers of Augustine.

- Evolution. In view of Augustine’s notion of causality, it is evident that his theory of seminal reasons cannot be equated with creative evolutionism in the sense of a successive production of essentially new forms. For Augustine, the forms of things were created simultaneously in their original state and successively unfold.201 Seminal reasons seem to be principles of stability, accounting more for the fixity than for the flux of species.202 While his theory of traducianism clearly implies stability of form with a human being begetting another of its kind, its conception of one soul generating another seems irreconcilable with an unequivocal affirmation of the soul’s spirituality.

- Charity. Augustine’s theology of charity surpassed Greek intellectualistic ethics to establish man’s complete dependence on God in willing, loving, and liberty. Whereas ancient philosophers tended to stress the cognitive side of man’s nature, Augustine envisioned the will as the central drive of politico-ethical existence with universal history as a dialectic between the human and divine will. Though he insisted on man’s moral weakness, Augustine optimistically viewed history as divine love universally working for the restoration of fallen man. Charity is the essence of mysticism for Augustine, the Doctor of Charity.203

Augustine’s masterly synthesis of universal history in the City of God merits him the accolade of founder of philosophy of history, or, if one prefers, theology of history, since his interpretation is from a Christian perspective. His ideal of a single universal society has evoked various visions of the unity of mankind: Emperor Charlemagne, four centuries after Augustine, probably conceived and founded his empire as the embodiment of the heavenly city on earth; in the 13th century, Roger Bacon dreamt of bringing all men within the unity of the Church and Christendom; in the 16th century, Tommaso Campanella envisioned a secular ideal of men united under the wisest and holiest metaphysician; in the 17th century, Leibniz had the vision of a philosophical ideal according to which humankind is bound together by common rational truths. For Augustine, God must be the principle of unity: "The only possible source of future unity lies not in multiplicity, but above it. One World is impossible without One God and One Church. In this truth lies the ever timely message conveyed by St. Augustine."204

Perhaps no Christian philosopher has influenced the course of Western thought as much as the august Augustine. His philosophy is a living fountain from which all the great thinkers of the Middle Ages will draw ideas. As Augustinism encounters a resurgence of Aristotelianism in the 13th and 14th centuries, some philosophers like Bonaventure and Roger Bacon will remain deeply Augustinian in spirit, while others such as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus will attempt to Aristotelianize it. In modern times, Augustine’s influence will be felt especially by Descartes,205 Luther, Calvin, some of the German idealists,206 and Blondel.207 Medieval in spirit, Augustinian Philosophy still inspires anew the modern mind.

1. C. Dawson, "St. Augustine and His Age," Monument to St. Augustine (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945), p. 15.