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Augustine (Thought-Modes) (01)
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Augustine (Thought-Modes) (01)..
(II) THE MODES OF AUGUSTINE'S THINKING
1. Existence and Biblical Interpretation
A. Metaphysics of inner experience
(1) Windelband called this manner of thinking a "metaphysics of inner experience."
(2) Man, cried Augustine, "is an immense abyss (grande profundum est ipse homo), whose very hairs Thou numberest, O Lord....
A few examples:
(1) First example: “Memory”
1) Endlessly we visualize things we have seen in the past, that our imagination produces. A vast inner temple stands open to me.
2) And so he continues: "I say, it is a power of mine and appertains unto my nature," and yet, "I myself do not grasp all that I am. Therefore is the mind too narrow to contain itself?
3) When Augustine speaks of the waves of the sea, the rivers, and the stars, he marvels "that when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking on them with my eyes, and yet I could not speak of them unless those mountains, and waves, and rivers, and stars which I saw, and that ocean which [I never saw and only] believe in, I saw inwardly in my memory in the same vast dimensions as I saw them outside myself."
(2) Second example: “Self-certainty”
1) Augustine was first to express thought, which he couches in a number of forms, that all doubt in the truth is dispelled by the certainty of "I am."
① "For even if he doubts... he understands that he is doubting... A man may doubt everything else, but he should not doubt any of these facts; if they were not so, he could doubt of nothing" (De Trinitate).
② Thus doubt in itself demonstrates the truth: I am if I doubt. For doubt itself is possible only if I am.
2) Self-certainty shows me not only that I am, but what I am.
① In self-certainty, I find a perception of what is beyond all sensory perception and all knowledge of things in the world.
② We possess still another sense, far above any corporeal sense, the sense of the inner man, by which we perceive right and wrong.
③ In self-certainty I find my all-embracing, unbridled will to happiness.
(3) Third example: "Time"
1) Augustine concerns himself with time. It is present.
2) We speak of past, present, future. "If nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time."
But strange; past and future are not, the past is no longer, the future is not yet, and if the present were always present, if it did not lose itself in the past, it would no longer be a time.
In order to be a time, the present must exist in the fact that it passes immediately into nonbeing.
3) Are there three times, or only one, the present? For indeed, future and past are only in the present.
① When I relate things past, I regard their images in the present.
② When I think of the future, possible actions and images are present in my mind.
4) There is only the present and in the present three times.
① The memory is present in regard to the past, intuition is present in regard to the present, and expectation is present in regard to the future.
② But what is the present? What we say about long or short periods of time applies to the past and future.
(a) A hundred years, a year, a day, an hour: they cannot be present.
(b) However long they may endure, there is always something of the past, present, and future in them.
③ If we could conceive of a time that could no longer be divided into infinitesimal particles, we should say that it alone is the present. (Fleeting, decisive point)
④ But so quickly does this particle of time pass from the future into the past that the present has no duration. (kairos)
⑤ It is only a point, a boundary; in being, it is no longer.
5) Augustine was driven to the question of what time is by the argument against the idea of Creation: What did God do before He created heaven and earth?
① If He was resting, why did He not remain in inactivity?
② If a new will rose up in Him, can we speak of a true eternity in which a will comes into being that was not there before?
③ But if the will was present from all eternity, why is the Creation not eternal?
6) Augustine resolves this objection to the idea of Creation as follows: With the Creation, God also created time; before that, there was no time.
① The question is meaningless, because, for Him who created time but is not in it, there is no temporal "before." (It is due to concept of past)
② Time has a beginning, says the Bible; but there was no time before this beginning, says Augustine.
③ Karl Jaspers thinks it in order, through this same mystery, to gain certainty of eternity. God's eternity and my own, in which time is extinguished.
B. Interpretation of the Bible:
(1) His philosophizing does not understand itself as a clarification of existence or a thinking of God out of mere self-certainty; it seeks its truth in a Biblical interpretation grounded in faith.
(2) In many texts insight is gained through Biblical exegesis or confirmed by quotations from the Bible.
(3) The fundamental belief that the Bible is the sole source of essential truth, transforms thinking.
(4) Opinion is no longer based on reason as such or on the essence of man as he is given to himself in reason, but along with reason on the Bible.
(5) The Bible became his never-failing guide to the truth.
(6) For Augustine the Bible was the language of revelation that is the source of all truth; the philosophical idea of transcendence was fulfilled by the Biblical idea of God.
(7) Reason and faith are not two separate sources that meet at some point. Reason is in faith, faith in reason.
(8) Augustine's writings (except for the earliest) are shot through with quotations from the Bible.
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Introduction
Theology 