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Augustine (Thought-Modes) (02)
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Augustine (Thought-Modes) (02).
2. Reason and Believed Truth
1. Common Truth
(1) The truth is only one. It is the "common possession of all its friends." The claim to have a truth of one's own is a "presumptuous assertion," it is "vain-glory." (presuming)
1) Bible says "Because Thy truth, O Lord, does not belong to me, to this man or that man, but to us all, Thou hast called us to it with a terrible warning not to claim it exclusively for ourselves, for if we do we shall lose it."
2) Anyone who chooses to regard it as his sole possession, will be expelled from the common possession to his own, that is, from truth to lie."
(2) Accordingly, Augustine sets out to seek the common truth, even in the company of his adversaries.
(3) Such a quest is possible only if both parties relinquish the pretension to being already in possession of the truth.
2. Truth of Faith : Turnabout manner
(1) He is certain about the truth of his faith; only the particulars of its formulation can remain in doubt.
(2) In practice, Augustine, contrary to his earlier demands, concludes that force should be used against those of different faith.
(3) This same turnabout from open communication to the right of the sole authority to employ violence may be observed in the following:
1) In pious thoughts, Augustine forbids setting anything else in the place of God.
2) To see the authority of faith in the surface of things is to take too short a view.
(4) Authority is only in God. Everything else is along the way and becomes idolatry if taken in God's stead. But now comes the turnabout.
① To the question: Where does God speak?
② the answer is always: In revelation.
(5) They worship, in faith, hope, and charity, the consubstantial and immutable triunity of the one supreme God.
(6) Therefore Augustine says:
1) “Know in order to believe, believe in order to know" (intellige ut credos, erode ut intelligas).
2) “Belief, too, is thinking.”
3) “To believe is nothing other than to think with assent” (cum assensione cogitare).
4) “A being that cannot think can also not believe.” (Schuller)
5) “Therefore: Love reason” (intellectum valde ama).
6) “Without faith there can be no insight.”
(7) Thus the astonishing Augustinian turnabout culminates in the coercion of those of different belief. (must criticize)
A. Theory of knowledge: Epistemological Understanding
(1) Our fundamental experience of thinking is that a light dawns on us by which we recognize the universal validity and necessity of timeless truths, such as: The miracle of the truth is that I know something that I do not see outside myself in space and time.
1) How do I, a finite creature of the senses, living in space and time, come to truth of such a timeless, non-sensory, non-spatial character?
① Augustine replied with Platonic metaphors and metaphors of his own;
(a) The truth rested unknown within me; made attentive, I draw it from my own previously hidden and still unfathomable inwardness.
(b) When I discern it, I see it with a light that comes from God. Without this light there could be no insight.
(c) There is an inward teacher, who is in communication with the logos, the word of God, which instructs me.
② Augustine's reflection on the riddle of valid truth leads him to find God's action in valid truth.
2) What was later unfolded in rich developments, complex distinctions and knowledge, has its historic ground in the sharp formulations which Augustine derived from various sources.
3) But there is one Platonic idea from which Augustine never departs:
① Though we see the truth in a divine light, we do not see God Himself.
② Our knowledge is no feeble reflection of divine knowledge, but different from it in essence.
(2) Though the truth that we know is one, it includes several factors : Knowledge and will.
1) Knowledge and will are both one and distinct. Separately, knowledge is nothing; it takes on meaning only in unity with the will.
2) The will to prove the existence of God does not arise from the mere intellect.
3) Augustine deplores his former error of wishing to know the invisible in the same sense as he knew that seven and three make ten (mathematical).
4) There are riddles upon riddles:
① the creation of the world,
② the unity of soul and body.
5) The conditions for knowledge of the truth are:
① purity of soul,
② love,
③ the worthiness that comes of a life of piety.
B. Revelation and Church: Components
(1) The truth has reason and revelation as components. They are one and separate.
(2) God not only illumines the knowledge of the mind, but bestows the truth itself through the revelation of the present Church and the Biblical Church.
(3) Faith is ecclesiastical faith or it is no faith at all. For Augustine it is certain that God can be found only in this way.
(4) His faith is not only the fundamental experience of selfhood as being-given-to-oneself, but beyond that, an overpowering of selfhood from outside:
C. Superstition: Non-scientific
1. His View of Science
(1) Augustine despised the sciences. (due to superstition?)
(2) He held that concern with them is rewarding(valuable) only in sofar as it promotes understanding of the Bible.
(3) Although the ancient books were still available, Augustine's age had almost forgotten the sciences, which had ceased to develop in the last century before Christ.
2. His View of the World
(1) For him the world was without interest, except insofar as the creation points to the Creator.
(2) It (the world) is a place of parables, images, traces.
(3) We see Augustine in conflict with superstition and himself caught up in superstition. (must criticize)
3. Superstition and Science
(1) To his mind superstition supported by the Bible was no superstition.
(2) But some find nearly all the superstitions of his time strangely intermingled in his work.
(3) In his polemics against the Manichaeans he used reasoned arguments.
(4) His indictment was: "They made me believe blindly." He saw through the unreason of their pseudo knowledge.
(5) His use of reasoned arguments against it, however, bears witness for a moment to his inclination for scientific, that is to say, logical, methodic, empirical investigation, and for the distinction between the knowable and the unknowable.
(6) Karl Jaspers shall cite an example which at the same time shows the profundity of Augustine's thinking.
1) He combated astrology as a superstition dangerous to the salvation of the soul.
2) Some of his arguments are perfectly sound and still valid today.
3) But then he goes on to observe that since many men have succumbed to this superstition, it must be considered as a reality, and, moreover, that astrological predictions are sometimes accurate.
4) How is this to be accounted for? Augustine's answer: By the existence of demons.
① In the lower regions of the air there live evil angels, servants of the devil-
② They gain power over those men who lust for evil things and deliver them over to mockery and deception.
③ These delusions have no force or reality, but "because men concerned themselves with these things and gave them names, they first acquired power.
5) But the deception is dispelled when truth triumphs in the life of one who believes in the one God.
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Introduction
Theology 