Who is augustine

Over one hundred panegyrics of various saints written by St. Augustine are still extant. Augustine complains of certain vagabond monks who went about selling relics of the martyrs, if indeed martyrs they were. It is, in my opinion, very singular that Bayle should pretend to be more severe than St.

An important teacher in the Christian church , who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries. After a dramatic conversion to Christianity , Augustine became a bishop. He is a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. His works include The City of God and his autobiography , Confessions. New Word List Word List.

Save This Word! He also sticks to his conviction that immortality is a necessary condition of happiness but insists that it is not a sufficient condition, given that immortality and misery are compatible cf. De civitate dei 9. Resurrection, however, is not susceptible of rational proof; it is a promise of God that must be believed on Scriptural authority De trinitate ib.

Together with an essentially Platonic notion of the soul, Augustine inherits the classical problems of Platonic soul-body dualism. De quantitate animae 22 if it is incorporeal itself? And how are corporeal and psychic aspects related to each other in phenomena that involve both body and soul, especially if, like passions and desires, these are morally relevant?

These problems are further complicated by the Platonic axiom that incorporeal entities, being ontologically prior to corporeal ones, cannot be causally affected by them. With Plotinus, he insists that sense perception is not an affection which the soul passively undergoes as Stoic materialism would have it, where sensory perception was interpreted as a kind of imprint in the soul but its active awareness of affections undergone by the body De quantitate animae 41; 48; De Genesi ad litteram 7.

In De musica 6. In addition to the usual five senses, Augustine identifies a sensory faculty that relates the data of the senses to each other and judges them aesthetically but not morally; De musica 6.

In Neoplatonism it was disputed how soul, being immortal, immaterial and ontologically superior to body, came to be incorporated nevertheless. Augustine addresses the issue in the horizon of his doctrine of creation and, in the period of the Pelagian Controversy, of the debate about the transmission of original sin see 9.

Gender, Women and Sexuality. In De libero arbitrio 3. After all these options come to the fore again Letters Augustine discards none of them officially except for the notion, wrongly associated with Origenism, which was considered a heresy at the time, that incorporation was a punishment for a sin committed by the pre-existent soul De civitate dei In practice, he narrows the debate down to the alternative between creationism and traducianism, which appear to have been the only options taken seriously by his Christian contemporaries.

Augustine deploys what we may call his philosophy of the mind most fully in his great work on Nicene Trinitarian theology, De trinitate.

Having removed apparent Scriptural obstacles to the equality and consubstantiality of the three divine persons bks. The basis for this move is, of course, Genesis — Augustine follows a long-standing Jewish and Patristic tradition, familiar to him from Ambrose, according to which the biblical qualification of the human being as an image of God referred not to the living body a literalist reading vulnerable to the Manichean charge of anthropomorphism, cf.

Confessiones 6. The general pattern of his argument is the Augustinian ascent from the external to the internal and from the senses to God; but since human reason is, whether by nature or due to its fallen state, hardly capable of knowing God, Augustine this time is obliged to interrupt and re-start the ascent several times.

The final book shows that the exercise of analyzing the human mind does have preparatory value for our thinking about the Trinity but does not yield insight into the divine by being simply transferred to it De trinitate The last element ensures the active character of perception and intellection but also gives weight to the idea that we do not cognize an object unless we consciously direct our attention to it MacDonald b.

Augustine begins by arguing in a manner reminiscent of his cogito-like argument; see 5. This pre-reflexive self-awareness is presupposed by every act of conscious cognition. As the mind in its fallen state is deeply immersed in sensible reality, it tends to forget what it really is and what it knows it is and confounds itself with the things it attaches the greatest importance to, i. The result are materialist theories about the soul, which thus derive from flawed morality De trinitate If it follows the Delphic command, however, the mind will realize that it knows with certainty that it exists, thinks, wills etc.

And as the substance or essence of the mind cannot be anything other than what it knows with certainty about itself, it follows that nothing material is essential to the mind and that its essence must be sought in its mental acts ib.

Again, the ethical side of the theory should not be overlooked. As a strong voluntary element is present in and necessary for an act of cognition, what objects imaginations, thoughts we cognize is morally relevant and indicative of our loves and desires. And while the triadic structure of the mind is its very essence and hence inalienable, Augustine insists that the mind is created in the image of God, not because it is capable of self-knowledge, but because it has the potential to become wise, i.

He takes it as axiomatic that happiness is the ultimate goal pursued by all human beings e. Confessiones Wetzel , 42— This structure Augustine inscribes into his Neoplatonically inspired three-tiered ontological hierarchy Letter The Supreme Being is also the greatest good; the desire of created being for happiness can only be satisfied by the creator.

If we turn away from him and direct our attention and love to the bodies—which are not per se bad, as in Manicheism, but an infinitely lesser good than God—or to ourselves, who are a great good but still subordinate to God, we become miserable, foolish and wicked Letter Just as after the Fall all human beings are inevitably tainted by sin, we need to be purified through faith in order to live well and to restore our ability to know and love God De diversis quaestionibus We love absolutely only what we enjoy, whereas our love for things we use is relative and even instrumental De doctrina christiana 1.

The only proper object of enjoyment is God cf. Wickedness and confusion of the moral order results from a reversal of use and enjoyment, when we want to enjoy what we ought to use all created things, e. An obvious problem of this system is the categorization of the biblically prescribed love of the neighbor.

Are we to enjoy our neighbor or to use her? The problem is inherited from ancient eudaimonism, where it takes some philosophical effort to reconcile the intuition that concern for others is morally relevant with the assumption that ethics is primarily about the virtue and happiness of the individual.

Augustine is aware of the problem and gives a differentiated answer. In De doctrina christiana 1. Love of the neighbor thus means to desire his true happiness in the same way as we desire our own.

Confessiones 4. In principle Augustine follows the view of the ancient eudaimonists that virtue is sufficient or at least relevant for happiness. There are however several important modifications. True virtue guarantees true happiness, but there is no true virtue that is not a gift of grace. The perfect inner tranquility virtue strives for will only be achieved in the afterlife. Virtue is an inner disposition or motivational habit that enables us to perform every action we perform out of right love.

There are several catalogues of the traditional four cardinal virtues prudence, justice, courage and temperance that redefine these as varieties of the love of God either in this life or in the eschaton De moribus 1.

This does not mean that virtue becomes non-rational for Augustine love and will are essential features of the rational mind; see 6.

The criterion of true virtue is that it is oriented toward God. Even if Augustine occasionally talks as if the four cardinal virtues could be added to the Pauline or theological virtues of love, faith and hope to make a sum of seven Letter A. These modifications have several interesting consequences. Even though Augustine postpones the happiness that is the reward of virtue to the afterlife, he does not make virtue a means to an end in the sense that virtue becomes superfluous when happiness is reached.

To the contrary, he insists that virtue will persist in the eschaton where it will be transformed into eternal unimpeded fruition of God and of the neighbor in God.

Then it will indeed be its own reward and identical with happiness Letter Both eschatological virtue and virtue in this life are thus love of God; they only differ in that the latter is subject to hindrances and temptation.

For this reason, those who have true love of God—e. When analyzing virtue in this life, Augustine takes up the Stoic distinction, familiar to him from Cicero De officiis 1. Augustine therefore distinguishes between true i. Among other things, this distinction underpins his solution of the so-called problem of pagan virtue Harding ; Tornau b; Dodaro a: 27—71; Rist — because it permits ascribing virtue in a meaningful sense to pagan and pre-Christian paradigms of virtue like Socrates without having to admit that they were eligible for salvation.

From this point of view, Socrates is closer to Paul than to Nero, even though his virtue will not bring him happiness, i. It is closely related to virtue and often used synonymously with will e. De civitate dei As in the Symposium and in Plotinus Enneads I. In a more general way, love means the overall direction of our will positively toward God or negatively toward ourselves or corporeal creature De civitate dei The former is called love in a good sense caritas , the latter cupidity or concupiscence cupiditas , i.

The root of sin is excessive self-love that wants to put the self in the position of God and is equivalent with pride De civitate dei In his earlier work, Augustine has some difficulties incorporating love of neighbor into the Platonic and eudaimonist framework of his thinking De doctrina christiana 1.

After , in the context of his reflections on the Trinity and his exegesis of the First Epistle of John esp. In loving our neighbors, we of necessity love that love which enables us to do so itself, which is none other than God; love of God and love of neighbor are, accordingly, co-extensive and, ultimately, identical De trinitate 8. He keenly insists that each and every action, even if it is externally good and impressive, can be motivated either by a good or an evil intention, by right or perverse love, by charity or pride.

This goes for the actions prescribed by the Sermon of the Mount and even for martyrdom In epistulam Iohannis tractatus decem 8. It is therefore impossible to give casuistic rules for external moral behavior.

In a sense, his ideal agent is a successor of the Stoic and Neoplatonic sage, who always acts out of inner virtue or perfect rationality the latter Augustine replaces with true love but adapts his outward actions to the external circumstances cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos On the one hand, this limits the authority of other people—including those endowed with worldly power or an ecclesiastical office—to pass moral judgments.

Augustine repeatedly recommends withholding judgment so as to preserve humility De civitate dei 1. On the other hand, Augustine makes our inner motivational and moral life opaque even to ourselves and fully transparent only to God Confessiones We can never be fully sure about the purity of our intentions, and even if we were, we could not be sure that we will persist in them.

All human beings are therefore called to constantly scrutinize the moral status of their inner selves in a prayerful dialogue with God as it is dramatized in the Confessiones. Such self-scrutiny may well be self-tormenting; the obsession of Western Christianity with inner latent guilt here has its Augustinian roots. Catholic bishops are therefore obliged to compel heretics and schismatics to re-enter the Catholic church even forcibly, just as a father beats his children when he sees them playing with snakes or as we bind a madman who otherwise would fling himself down a precipice Letter Obviously, this is a paternalistic argument that presupposes superior insight in those who legitimately wield coercive power.

And as even the Church in this world is a mixed body of sinners and saints see 8. History and Political Philosophy , it may be asked how individual bishops can be sure of their good intentions when they use religious force Rist — Augustine does not address this problem, presumably because most of his relevant texts are propagandistic defenses of coercion against the Donatists.

Though other Latin philosophers, especially Seneca, had made use of the concept of will voluntas before Augustine, it has a much wider application in his ethics and moral psychology than in any predecessor and covers a broader range of phenomena than either Aristotelian boulesis roughly, rational choice or Stoic prohairesis roughly, the fundamental decision to lead a good life.

Augustine comes closer than any earlier philosopher to positing will as a faculty of choice that is reducible neither to reason nor to non-rational desire. Augustine admits both first-order and second-order volitions, the latter being acts of the liberum voluntatis arbitrium , the ability to choose between conflicting first-order volitions Stump ; Horn ; den Bok Like desires, first-order volitions are intentional or object-directed and operate on all levels of the soul.

Like memory and thought, will is a constitutive element of the mind see 6. It is closely related to love and, accordingly, the locus of moral evaluation. We act well or badly if and only if our actions spring from a good or evil will, which is equivalent to saying that they are motivated by right i.

With this basic idea in view, Augustine defends the passions or emotions against their Stoic condemnation as malfunctions of rational judgment by redefining them more neutrally as volitions voluntates that may be good or bad depending on their intentional objects De civitate dei 9.

As in Stoicism, the will to act is triggered by an impression generated by an external object visum. To this the mind responds with an appetitive motion that urges us to pursue or to avoid the object e. But only when we give our inner consent to this impulse or withhold it, does a will emerge that, circumstances permitting, results in a corresponding action. The will is the proper locus of our moral responsibility because it is neither in our power whether an object presents itself to our senses or intellect nor whether we take delight in it De libero arbitrio 3.

The only element that is in our power is our will or inner consent, for which we are therefore fully responsible.

Thus, a person who has consented to adultery is guilty even if his attempt actually to commit it is unsuccessful, and a victim of rape who does not consent to the deed keeps her will free of sin even if she feels physical pleasure De civitate dei 1. Temptations of this kind are, in Augustine, not personal sins but due to original sin, and they haunt even the saints. Our will must be freed by divine grace to resist them Contra Iulianum 6.

In the s, opposing the dualistic fatalism of the Manicheans, he uses the cogito-like argument see 5. Harrison A contemporaneous definition of will as a movement of soul toward some object of desire emphasizes the absence of external constraint, and the ensuing definition of sin as an unjust volition see above seems to endorse the principle of alternative possibilities De duabus animabus 14— In De libero arbitrio , free will appears as the condition of possibility of moral goodness and hence as a great good itself; but as it is not an absolute good which is God alone but only an intermediate one, it is liable to misuse and, hence, also the source of moral evil De libero arbitrio 2.

With all this, Augustine is basically in harmony with the traditional view of early Christian theology and exegesis, which is still adopted in the s by Julian of Aeclanum when he blames Augustine for having fallen back into Manichean fatalism and quotes his early definitions against him Julian, Ad Florum , in Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum 1.

Things change with Ad Simplicianum 1. The optimistic-sounding claim in the first book of De libero arbitrio 1. But he never questions the principle that we have been created with the natural ability to freely and voluntarily choose the good, nor does he ever deny the applicability of the cogito argument to the will cf.

De civitate dei 5. What grace does is to restore our natural freedom; it does not compel us to act against our will. What this means is best illustrated by the narrative of Confessiones 8 for particularly lucid interpretations, see Wetzel —; J.

Though he identifies with the former, better will rather than with the latter that actually torments him, he is unable to opt for it because of his bad habits, which he once acquired voluntarily but which have by now transformed into a kind of addictive necessity ib. Using medical metaphors reminiscent of Hellenistic moral philosophy, he argues that his will lacked the power of free choice because the disease of being divided between conflicting volitions had weakened it ib.

Before, when he had just continued his habitual way of life, this had been a non-choice rather than a choice, even though, as Augustine insists, he had done so voluntarily. In substance, this remained his line of defense when, in the Pelagian controversy, he was confronted with the charge that his doctrine of grace abolished free will De spiritu et littera 52—60; cf. De correptione et gratia 6. While the Pelagians thought that the principle of alternative possibilities was indispensable for human responsibility and divine justice, Augustine accepts that principle only for the first humans in paradise Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum 1.

In a way, by choosing wrongly Adam and Eve have abandoned free will both for themselves and for all humankind. Original sin transformed our initial ability not to sin into an inability not to sin; grace can restore ability not to sin in this life and will transform it into inability to sin in the next De civitate dei The problem of the origin of evil unde malum , he claims, had haunted him from his youth Confessiones 7.

At first, he accepted the dualist solution of the Manicheans, which freed God from the responsibility for evil but compromised his omnipotence ib. After having encountered the books of the Platonists, Augustine rejected the existence of an evil substance and endorsed the Neoplatonic view argued e.

In his mature view, which was largely developed during his anti-Manichean polemics, everything that has being is good insofar as it has been created by God. There are of course different degrees of goodness as well as of being Letter Creation and Time.

A created being can be said to be evil if and only if it falls short of its natural goodness by being corrupted or vitiated; strictly speaking, only corruption itself is evil, whereas the nature or substance or essence for the equivalence of the terms see De moribus 2.

While this theory can explain physical evil relatively easily either as a necessary feature of hierarchically ordered corporeal reality De ordine 2. Augustine answers by equating moral evil with evil will and claims that the seemingly natural question of what causes evil will is unanswerable.

His most sustained argument to this effect is found in his explanation of the fall of the devil and the evil angels, a case that, being the very first occurrence of evil in the created world, allows him to analyze the problem in its most abstract terms De civitate dei The cause can neither be a substance which, qua substance, is good and unable to cause anything evil nor a will which would in turn have to be an evil will in need of explanation.

The fact that evil agents are created from nothing and hence are not, unlike God, intrinsically unable to sin is a necessary condition of evil but not a sufficient one after all the good angels successfully kept their good will. In this context Augustine, in an interesting thought experiment, imagines two persons of equal intellectual and emotional disposition of whom one gives in to a temptation while the other resists it; from this he concludes that the difference must be due to a free, spontaneous and irreducible choice of the will De civitate dei Here at least Augustine virtually posits the will as an independent mental faculty.

As he points out himself, his conviction that human beings in their present condition are unable to do or even to will the good by their own efforts is his most fundamental disagreement with ancient, especially Stoic, virtue ethics De civitate dei After and because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, we have lost our natural ability of self-determination, which can only be repaired and restored by the divine grace that has manifested itself in the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ and works inwardly to free our will from its enslavement to sin.

Augustine emphasizes the necessity of grace for both intellectual understanding and moral purification already in his earliest works cf. Soliloquia 1. This explanation is explicitly rejected in Ad Simplicianum 1. The guiding intention of Romans 9, Augustine now says, is to preclude vainglory and pride ib.

Free will has nothing to do with the reception of that gift because nobody can will to receive a divine call to faith nor to respond positively to it so as to act accordingly and perform good works out of love Ad Simplicianum 1. While gratuitous election is, apart from being consoling, comparatively easily squared with the axioms of divine benevolence, justice and omnipotence, its corollary, the equally gratuitous reprobation and damnation of Esau, is a serious philosophical problem ib.

Romans The notion of original sin was not invented by Augustine but had a tradition in African Christianity, especially in Tertullian. The view that original sin is a personally imputable guilt that justifies eternal damnation is, however, new with Ad Simplicianum and follows with logical necessity from the exegetical and philosophical claims made there about divine grace and election Flasch ; contrast De libero arbitrio 3.

The theory of Ad Simplicianum is illustrated, with great philosophical acumen and psychological plausibility, in the Confessiones especially bk. After , pressed by his Pelagian opponents, Augustine paid increasing attention to the mechanics of the transmission of original sin. The result was a quasi-biological theory that associated original sin closely with sexual concupiscence see 9.

This knowledge is however hidden to human beings, to whom it will only be revealed at the end of times De correptione et gratia Until then, nobody, not even a baptized Christian, can be sure whether grace has given her true faith and a good will and, if so, whether she will persevere in it till the end of her life so as to be actually saved De correptione et gratia 10—25; cf.

While in Hellenism this had largely been a theoretical issue, it acquired practical relevance under the circumstances of monastic life: some North African monks objected to being rebuked for their misbehavior with the argument that they were not responsible for not yet enjoying the gift of divine grace De correptione et gratia 6.

Taking up ideas from De magistro and from Ad Simplicianum , Augustine replies that rebuke may work as an external admonition, even as a divine calling, that helps people turn to God inwardly and hence must not be withheld De correptione et gratia 7—9. To the query that predestination undermines free will, Augustine gives his usual answer that our freedom of choice has been damaged by original sin and must be liberated by grace if we are to develop the good will necessary for virtue and happiness.

Wetzel — ; some, especially later, texts do however present prevenient grace as converting the will with coercive force Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 1. A problem related to predestination but not equivalent to it is divine foreknowledge Matthews 96—; Wetzel ; for general discussion, Zagzebski His solution is that while external actions may be determined, inner volitions are not.

These are certainly foreknown by God but exactly as what they are, i. De libero arbitrio 3. This argument is independent of the doctrine of grace and original sin; it applies not just to fallen humankind but also to Adam and Eve and even to the devil, whose transgression God had, of course, foreseen De civitate dei The criterion of membership in the city of God a metaphor Augustine takes from the Psalms, cf.

A combination of his own studies in Neo-Platonism , his reading of an account of the life of Saint Anthony of the Desert , and the combined influence of his mother, his friend Simplicianus and, particularly, the influential bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose - , gradually inclined Augustine towards Christianity. In the summer of , he officially converted to Catholic Christianity , abandoned his career in rhetoric, quit his teaching position in Milan, and gave up any ideas of the society marriage which had been arranged for him, and devoted himself entirely to serving God , the priesthood and celibacy.

He detailed this spiritual journey in his famous "Confessions" , which became a classic of both Christian theology and world literature. In , he returned to Africa , although his mother died on the way there, and his son Adeodatus died soon after, leaving him alone in the world, without family. He sold his patrimony , giving the money to the poor, and converted the family house into a monastic foundation for himself and a group of friends. In , he was ordained a priest and later bishop at Hippo Regius on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria, and he became a famous preacher , particularly noted for opposing Manichaeism and heresies such as Donatism and Pelagianism.

He remained in this position at Hippo until his death in , working tirelessly to convert the diverse local racial and religious groups to the Catholic faith. Augustine died on 28 August , aged 75, during the siege of Hippo by the Germanic Vandals , who destroyed all of the city except Augustine's cathedral and library. His body was later moved to Pavia , Italy or, according to another account, to Cagliari on the island of Sardinia. Almost throughout his life he had been a lonely, isolated figure , not attached to any intellectual or academic movement, and without any university or institutional support for his work.

At the time of his death, he was apparently the only person in his whole town who possessed any books at all. He was made a saint patron saint of brewers, printers, sore eyes and theologians of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches, and among the Orthodox he is known as Blessed Augustine or St. Augustine the Blessed. He is the patron of the Augustinian religious order the Catholic monastic order of both men and women living according to a guide to religious life known as the Rule of Saint Augustine.

In , he was made a pre-eminent Doctor of the Church. Augustine wrote over works in Latin, many of them texts on Christian doctrine and apologetic works against various heresies. He is best known for the "Confessiones" "Confessions" , a personal account of his early life, completed in about , "De civitate Dei" "The City of God" , consisting of 22 books started in and finished in , dealing with God, martyrdom, Jews and other Christian philosophies and "De Trinitate" "On the Trinity" , consisting of 15 books written over the final 30 years of his life, in which he developed the "psychological analogy" of the Trinity.

In both his philosophical and theological reasoning, he was greatly influenced by Stoicism , Platonism and Neo-Platonism , particularly the "Enneads" of Plotinus his generally favorable view of Neo-Platonic thought contributed to its entrance into the Christian , and subsequently the European , intellectual tradition.

He was also influenced by the works of the Roman poet Virgil for his teaching on language , Cicero for his teaching on argument and Aristotle particularly his "Rhetoric" and "Poetics". Augustine argued that Skeptics have no basis for claiming to know that there is no knowledge , and he believed that genuine human knowledge can be established with certainty.