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Augustine (Thought-Criticism) (05)
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Augustine (Thought-Criticism) (05).
(5) Historical Position, Influence and
Present Importance
1. Historical Position
(1) Augustine lived during the decline and shortly before the end of the Western Empire.
1) The Roman Empire still existed with its temples and works of art, its rhetoric and philosophy, its public games and theaters.
2) Africa was a relatively rich province, and Carthage was a large city, rife with luxury.
3) But decay was everywhere.
① There was no organic solution to the rising discontent (the schismatic Christian Donatists were in league with pillaging rebels, the Circumcelliones),
② The Empire lacked the power to withstand the barbarian invaders (the Vandals were besieging Hippo at the time of Augustine's death).
③ Amid the political and economic decline of the Western Roman world, Augustine, at the last moment, laid the spiritual foundation of an utterly new future.
(2) He was the last great figure of Western antiquity. Transforming the past in his work, he passed it on to a new era, in whose spiritual development he played a decisive part.
(3) But this is not how Augustine himself saw it. He did not foresee the end of Western culture. To him Roman culture was both self-evident and indifferent; there was no other.
(4) In reading Augustine it is the ancient Roman world, not that of the Middle Ages, that we must bear in mind.
(5) Amid increasing distress, mounting violence, and widespread despair, Augustine conceived a courageous attitude with which it was possible to live.
1) It was not meant politically or economically, not based on worldly hopes, but rooted in transcendence and oriented exclusively toward the salvation of the soul in the eternal kingdom of heaven.
2) Thus Augustine, in writing finis to an era, achieved what the philosophers of the preceding centuries had sought and desired and thought they had achieved.
3) But this he did in an entirely different way, as a Christian, rejecting the great, pure, independent philosophy of antiquity.
(6) And thus Augustine became the creative thinker who, though he himself did not conceive of anything beyond the ancient world, provided the medieval consciousness amid an entirely different sociological and political reality with its foundation and spiritual weapons.
(7) Augustine himself did not live and think within the world-dominating Church of the Middle Ages.
(8) Both as a philosopher and as a Christian, Augustine belonged to an immense tradition.
1) Effective greatness has never risen singly from the void, but is always sustained by a great tradition that sets its tasks.
2) It is new because no one else has done what it succeeds in doing.
3) It is old because it works with materials that were already there, available to all.
(9) It is a mistake to exaggerate Augustine's originality, for he is great precisely because of the essentials that he took over from the past; he was sustained by the spiritual whole that was there before him and made up his environment.
(10) It is equally wrong to underestimate his originality, for he could not have been foreseen:
1) he melted down the ideas he found and in recasting them breathed new life into them.
2) His original religious experience seems to lend new weight to the traditional doctrines of the Church.
(11) Augustine's spiritual development took on an exemplary character for the West.
1) In a personal form, he embodied a spiritual process extending over several centuries: the transition from independent philosophy to Christian philosophy.
2) In Augustine the forms of ancient philosophy are adapted to a religious thinking grounded in revelation.
3) At the end of an era, at a time when the original impetus of philosophy had long been lost in mere repetition, Augustine, taking the Christian faith as the ground of his philosophizing, seized upon what was then the original possibility.
4) Awakened by the intellectual vitality of pagan philosophy, he brought to Christian thinking his supreme independence.
5) No pagan philosopher of his time or of the following centuries can be mentioned in the same breath with him.
(12) With Augustine the development of dogmatic theology passed from the Orient to the West.
1) The spiritualism of the Eastern Christian thinkers remained a power, but now it was reinforced by realistic practice.
2) In the West, the great tension between negation of the world and accomplishment in the world became a driving force.
3) The world renunciation embodied in monasticism (which spread through the Western world in Augustine's time and which he himself strongly favored) did not paralyze an infinitely patient activity in the world.
4) The intent was still to guide all things toward the eternal kingdom.
5) However, this was to be accomplished not only by secluded meditation but also by practical work in the world.
6) This was the passion of Augustine the ecclesiastic.
7) He created the formulas and arguments that justified this work in the world.
8) This was the beginning of a road that led from the Christian Orient to a steadily increasing activity of many kinds, culminating in the Calvinist ideal of work and worldly asceticism, and finally in a Calvinism shorn of its spiritual content, the empty, meaningless efficiency characteristic of modern life.
2. Influence
(1) Augustine was the end of an old tradition in Western Christian thought and the fountainhead of another that has been in progress ever since.
(2) His influence seems to be inexhaustible. For through their encounter with him countless philosophers have been awakened to new and original thinking.
(3) His influence springs from two sources, from his originality in which he excels any of the heretics and from his unconditional and unquestioned belief in the authority of the Catholic Church.
(4) It was by his originality that he influenced the heretics.
1) For because Augustine had gathered the widest range of contradictions into his philosophizing, he provided substance for mutually antagonistic parties within the Church and
2) for profound movements of revolt against the Church as well; Gottschalk, the ninth-century monk, Luther, the Jansenists.
(5) This first aspect of his thinking provided lasting impulses for a free, original philosophizing.
(6) His acceptance of Church authority, on the other hand, gave the Church every right to claim Augustine for its own in nearly all its great spiritual and political struggles.
(7) A history of Augustinism would be a history of Christian thought as a whole.
1) If we wish to grasp his essence in order to recognize it in the Christian thinking of later days, we cannot content ourselves with any formula:
① it is the tendency to original inward thought in contrast to mere intellectual operations; it is a radical thinking - through of problems;
② it is a thinking grounded in faith, not an intellectual derivation from presupposed dogmas;
③ it is a thinking that follows no prescribed method or system;
④ it is the thinking of the whole man, which in turn makes its claim upon the whole man.
2) Augustinism enjoyed exclusive dominance down to the twelfth century The Aristotelianism and Thomism of the thirteenth century brought opposition and completion.
3) The influence of St. Thomas was limited to the Catholic world. Augustine was no less a force among Protestants than among Catholics.
(8) When we speak of Augustinism in special historical contexts,
1) we are referring to particular doctrines, as, for example, predestination and the corresponding doctrine of grace (Luther, Calvin, the Jansenists) in contrast to the Semipelagiamsm of the official doctrine; or
2) the "illumination theory of knowledge" in contrast to the Aristotelian theory of abstraction; or
3) the unity of theology and philosophy (the disappearance of philosophy as an independent source) in contrast to the doctrine of degrees, according to which philosophy is an independent field of investigation arched over and completed, but not superseded, by theology.
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Introduction
Theology 