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Saint Augustine and the Augustinian Tradition Robert P. Russell, O.S.A. -- Editor Benedict A. Paparella, Ph.D. -- Associate Editor Copyright, 1967 by Villanova University Press -- all rights reserved Library of Congress catalog card number: 67-28192
The 1964 Saint Augustine Lecture
Augustine and the Greek Philosophers
John F. Callahan
[end of page vii] considerable and significant part of this fruitful scholarship. The Original lecture, delivered in the Spring of 1964, has been greatly enriched by the addition of copious and critical notes which will prove an asset for all who wish to pursue further the many rich insights suggested in this remarkable lecture. Robert P. Russell, O.S.A. -- Editor Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania [end of page viii]
The present work appears here, except for minor alterations, as it was originally written before the lecture itself, for which numerous omissions had to be made for reasons of time. The editors have generously allowed the fuller version to be printed, along with notes that supply, I trust, the basic references required by the text and offer a limited discussion of some pertinent topics. They have also permitted me to use a considerable amount of Greek and Latin in the text and notes, but, in conformity with the nature of the lecture, the text is intended to be intelligible without a knowledge of these languages. I am especially glad that I was able to include in the notes an important passage in Greek from Gregory of Nyssa; I have referred extensively to his works her, since he seems to me to represent in an outstanding way the Greek philosophical tradition in its Christian guise. The text of this passage, which is taken from my forthcoming volume of two treatises of Gregory, De oratione dominica and De beatitudinibus, used with the kind permission of E.J. Brill. The study involved in this work goes back many years and owes much to periods of time provided by the Rockerfeller Foundation, the Fund for the Advancement of Education, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Georgetown University, to all of which I make grateful acknowledgement. Most of the actual composition was done at the Foundation Hardt, Vandoeuvres-Geneva, which placed it library and other facilities at my disposal; to the Counseil and to the other members of the Foundation Hardt, Vandoeuvres-Geneva, which placed its library and other facilities at my disposal; to the Conseil and to the other members of the Foundation who cooperated in the enterprise I give my sincere thanks. Finally, I am grateful to the editors for offering me the opportunity of participating in this series and for seeing the book through the press. J.F.C.
Contents
Introduction
Preface
I.The "Ontological" Argument for the Existence of God
1. Augustine and Anselm 1
2. The Divine Perfection in Greek Thought to Plotinus 5
3. The Divine Perfection in Gregory of Nyssa 11
4. The Divine Perfection in Augustine 16
5. Incorruptibility in Augustine and His Predecessors 20
6. The Greek Background of the "Ontological" Argument 29
7. The "Ontological" Argument in Augustine and Anselm 32
8. The Moral Universe of Augustine 39
9. The "Ontological" Character of Augustine's Argument 43
II. The Flight of the Soul
1. The Divine Origin of the Soul in Greek Thought to Plotinus 47
2. The Flight of the Soul in Augustine 52
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3. The Flight of the Soul in Gregory of Nyssa 55
4. Development within Augustine's Thought 58
5. Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa Compared 62
6. Distinctive Features of Augustine's Treatment 70
III. Time and the Soul
1. The Relation of Time to Soul in Greek Thought to Plotinus 74
2. The Nature of Time in Gregory of Nyssa 77
3. The Psychological Approach of Augustine 82
4. Augustine and His Predecessors Compared 87
5. The Moral Aspect of Time 90
6. Conclusion 93
Notes 96
Index 116
1. Augustine and Anselm [end of page 1]
of God.1 The crucial sentences of the argument, which he eventually discovered, run somewhat as follows: [end of page 2]
to believe that Anselm was influenced by his predecessor in this matter. But beyond the limited and largely verbal similarity it would be difficult to maintain that we have here a genuine source of the ontological I argument, since whatever argument the passage contains is quite differently formulated. It is an argument regarding a being than which a better is not thought, not a being than which a better cannot be thought, and it is based on the universal consent to such a being rather than on the content of the conception itself,4 which is the essence of Anselm's argument. [end of page 3]
involved, in this case for the incorruptibility of God, an attribute which places Him for Augustine beyond the range of evil. The mode of argumentation is very similar to that of Anselm. God is the greatest conceivable being and must therefore be incorruptible, since, if He were not, then another being possessing this perfection could be conceived that would be greater than God. The argument is based this time on the conception of God as the greatest conceivable being, just as it is in Anselm, the difference being that for incorruptibility Anselm substitutes existence. This substitution, as we shall see, is relatively simple, granted a different philosopher and the exigencies of another age, even though it was the introduction of existence into the argument by Anselm that made it both famous and controversial. [end of page 4]
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goddesses in form and beauty. In a divine realm that is conceived in a highly anthropomorphic way it is not surprising that physical beauty should be prominent among the perfections attributed to the gods. But other prerogatives were also jealously guarded by the immortals. One recalls the flaying suffered by Marsyas at the hands of Apollo, a frequent subject in ancient literature and art, the tragic outcome of the mortal's challenge to the musical ability of the god who was proud to be the leader of the Muses. And Niobe, turned to stone, mourns forever the death of her children, which she brought about by boasting, that her brood surpassed that of Leto, who was the mother of Artemis and Apollo.
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in the new scheme of things, the position of preeminence and authority traditionally occupied by the chief of the gods. [end of page 7]
existing fragment) is the saying of the tragic poet Euripides that God, if He is truly God, is in need of nothing.9 [end of page 8]
thought Plato posited the forms or ideas, those suprasensible models in imitating which, and only in this way, the sensible world around us can make some claim to a kind of being. At the same time, since these forms, and not their sensible counterparts, are fixed and stable, they provide us with the only object of true knowledge that the intellect can have; and there can be said to be knowledge of the sensible world only insofar as amid its change and flux it manifests patters of activity in which with the aid of the senses we can discern the imitation of the eternal forms. Plato has taken the principle first clearly enunciated by Parmenides and he has given it a much wider and more flexible application. He does not call the ideas by the name of God, and in this strict sense they do not belong to his theology. Nevertheless he has thereby made a most important contribution to later theology and to all philosophizing about God. There are many explicit statements in Plato, however, about God, and it would be well to mention some of them very briefly, since they continue the notion of the fitting stressed by Xenophanes, though sometimes only implicitly. In his discourse in the dialogue Timaeus on the origin of the universe he makes frequent reference to the craftsman responsible for the ordering of the universe, whom he calls God. In this highly metaphorical account it is essential to his purpose that the workings of nature be understood in terms of the goodness which underlies them and is indeed the very reason for them. With this in mind he affirms that the cause of the universe is good and, being without envy, desires that everything should be as good as possible.
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has not seen fit to equate "God" with the others, for reasons that are related to the purpose served by these terms in his dialectic, but which we cannot go into here. But later philosophers, even those who called themselves Platonists, had no hesitation in making combinations and in obliterating distinctions quite at variance with the Platonic method as it may be observed in the works of the master himself. Even before the period of Neo-Platonism there is evidence that the Platonic ideas, the archetypes of sensible becoming, are moving closer to the God who was for Plato primarily a dynamic and moving force. No doubt under the influence of the Aristotelian God, who is a self-thinking thought, the ideas are placed within the mind of God, and it is then a natural step to identify them with God or at least with one facet of divinity, as is the case with Plotinus. [end of page 11]
thoroughly versed in all aspects of Greek culture, philosophical and otherwise. His work is especially pertinent to us here, since he adapts in a striking way many themes that were developed in earlier Greek thought to his explication of Christian doctrine; and, moreover, he brings us close to the time of Augustine himself, since he died just a few years before Augustine wrote the Confessions. Gregory, much as he is indebted to the thought of Plotinus in many matters, is unequivocal in affirming being of God, saying, for example, that "to be truly" is a proper identifying mark of divinity;13 and, lest one be tempted in the manner of Plotinus to separate being and goodness, he states that being in the proper sense is the nature of the good.14 He often quotes the statement, "I am who am," saying, for, instance, that it offers one mark of true divinity; only that is truly divine, therefore, which is eternal and infinite in its being.15 [end of page 12]
ordering of the universe, and not with being, which, in the most usual sense of the term, is applied to the intelligible ideas in opposition to the sensible universe. Since the time of Plato the category of the "fitting" came to be used more and more with respect to God, so much so that a special term, for all practical purposes new, might now be employed, the OE07rpEffE's, that is, the God-befitting. This adjective is used with great frequency in Gregory to qualify some word like "thought" or "conception" that has the being of God as its object, or the word "name" as it is applied to God's being. The significance of the "God-befitting" is indeed so powerful that for Gregory it can be quite sufficient to say that a certain conception or name is not God-befitting in order to dismiss it from further consideration.16 We are moving in a realm of discourse reminiscent of the Parmenidean principle that what is thought and said must be, though in Gregory, of course, the rules that govern our thinking and saying are far more complex than they were in Parmenides, especially since we now have to take into account the intervention of Scripture with all that it reveals about the being of God. We have, in effect, in Gregory a fusion of Xenophanes and Parmenides, since for him only that which can properly be thought of God is actually thought of Him; anything else would be a contradiction that is not thought at all but only seems to be so. And we are not lacking echoes of the Platonic notion of "right" [Greek text ...] in this connection, as when we read that it is not right to attribute sense organs to God17 or to deny that the divine nature is always good.18 Moreover, instead of that which is
[end of page 13]
fitting or right or the opposite Gregory may speak of the "pious" [Greek text ...] or the "impious," employing extensively this related category applicable to thinking or speaking of God. [end of page 14]
the requirements of the situation, both philosophical and theological, in which Gregory found himself, since the doctrines stated above are directed against one or another heresy of his day. At the very center of his thought is the Parmenidean principle that what we can think and say is also that which exists. By means of this principle Parmenides arrived for the first time at changeless, eternal being; Plato set up the ideas as the archetypes of the whole world of becoming and the only true object of our knowledge; Plotinus devised a trinity of principles arranged in a hierarchy, the first of which, as the source of all being, must be beyond all being and therefore beyond the reach of thought as well. To a philosopher who does not belong to this tradition, in particular to an Aristotelian, such a procedure would appear as the confusing of two different orders, the logical and the metaphysical. Or, as Thomas Aquinas puts it in criticizing, the ontological argument of Anselm, this is an unwarranted passing from the mind to reality.28 To a philosopher, however, in the so-called Platonic tradition, amid all the differences that distinguish its members from one another, our conceptions and the words in which these conceptions are embodied enjoy a closer and more intimate relationship with their extra-mental counterparts than another type of philosopher would be prepared to admit. The modes in which our conceptions exist determine the modes of extra-mental reality. This is even true of Plotinus, for whom the first principle is utterly beyond all thought, and for Gregory of Nyssa, who never tires of cautioning us that human thought cannot hope to reach the essence of God.29
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yet without concern.34 Words of a basically religious character, which we have seen Plato employ to express what is proper or improper with regard to God, and which are used by Gregory in great profusion, are frequently found in Augustine, as when he says, speaking of free will, that it is unlawful (nefas) to believe that God has given man something He should not have given him,35 or when he states that it is blasphemous (sacrilegum) to think that the archetypes of things are outside of God."36 [end of page 17]
improperly (abusive), and He should rather be called essence, which may be applied to Him truly and properly (vere ac proprie). So perhaps God alone should be called essence, for He alone truly is (est), because He is unchanging and because He revealed that name to Moses in saying, "I am who am."37 [end of page 18]
ing things, and the frequency of his insistence on the e divine immobility may even at times seem surprising. In this passage the term "substance" offers difficulty to him precisely because it suggests that God is numbered among things that are changeable as well as non-simple; and the reason offered for saying that God alone truly is, we should note, is that He is unchanging. But, though the frame of the "fitting" and the "proper" shows a distant kinship with Xenophanes, the actual content of Augustine's argument here is in a direct line from Parmenides and Plato, and likewise a number of other figures who elaborated the philosophy of being, such as Plotinus and Gregory. Any term applied to God is improper if it implies a diminution of His being, and a term is proper if it attributes true being to Him alone. [end of page 19]
transcending all changeable creatures. And if I should ask you whether God is changeable or unchangeable you would answer without hesitation, "Perish the thought that I should believe or think God changeable; He is unchangeable." Your soul, however small, however attached perchance to things of the flesh, could answer only that God is unchangeable. How then were you able to flash forth to that which is above all changeable creatures so as to reply with certainty that God is unchangeable? What do you have within your heart when you think of a substance that is living, eternal, all-powerful, infinite, everywhere present and everywhere whole? When you think of those things this is the word "God" in your heart. While the word that consists of sounds passes away, that word which is signified by the sound remains.40 [end of page 20]
incorruptibility of God, as we have seen, in the passage where he anticipates the ontologi, cal argument of Anselm. Part of the reason for this lies in his overriding interest in the unchangeability that sets God apart from the world of created things, as we have noted in the passage just paraphrased, a preoccupation that is at least as pronounced as anything similar in Plato or Plotinus. But with the increasing interest in the role of man in the universe, in accordance with the Christian economy of salvation, as becomes very clear by the time of Gregory of Nyssa, terms like 'mortality" and "corruptibility," both of them aspects of change, have a greater significance than before, since the death of man and his liability to sin come more and more into the main focus of attention. In particular, the Christian philosophers received from the pagan Neo-Platonists the doctrine that evil is not something, positive but is rather a privation of being and good ness, and they soon adapted this to their own discussions of moral and metaphysical problems. Augustine, therefore, when he attempted to discover the origin of evil in human life, was by no means without predecessors in this matter, and the answers he gives show at every point their influence. It is not clear, however, how far their help was available to him in the early days of his search, and, in any case, the answers he was seeking were not merely theoretical, but practical ones that had to be worked into the pattern of his daily life. [end of page 21]
special interest for us here. He has given up the Manichaean doctrine that there is a supreme principle of evil as well as of good, and he no longer thinks of God as a body; but beyond this he does not know where to turn. He contrasts himself, the thinker, a man and the kind of man he was, with the object at which his thought was aiming the most high, the one and true God. (We recall his statement that the soul, small as it is and burdened with the flesh, can know that God is unchangeable.) He then adds that, despite his perplexities, he believed in his innermost being that God is incorruptible, inviolable, and unchangeable. The reason for this was that, though he knew not whence or how this should be, he saw clearly and certainly that whatever can be corrupted is inferior to that which cannot; what cannot be violated he unhesitatingly placed ahead of that which can; and whatever suffers no change he considered better than that which can change. And while he was s still obliged to think of God as extended somehow in space, though devoid of body, yet he thought of Him as incorruptible, inviolable, and unchangeable, which he placed ahead of their opposites.42 As we look at the argumentation that Augustine offers here, namely, that God is incorruptible and so on because things that are so are better than those that are not, it is clear what the implied premise of his syllogism is: whatever is better must be attributed to God, a principle that is at least strongly implied in all the thinkers so far mentioned, and one that is stated quite explicitly by Gregory of Nyssa. [end of page 22]
impossible for us to do more than speculate on this interesting and important question. It may be that certain doctrines of Plotinus were conveyed to him in the sermons of Ambrose, set forth no doubt in an appropriately Christian manner.43 I have had suspicions from time to time that Augustine had some kind of contact with the works of Gregory of Nyssa, since in many ways the doctrines of Gregory seem to be natural predecessors to those of Augustine; but sufficient documentation is not available on this point to be convincing. In any case, whatever external influences may have affected Augustine at this crucial point in his spiritual life, we may be sure that the shape of his thoughts and beliefs was primarily the work of his own vigorous spirit, as we see it operating everywhere else. There is a question to what extent we may accept as historical the steps in his conversion as recounted in the Confessions. But this question does not concern us here. It is just as good for our purposes to know that at some time he held the convictions just stated, and that when he was writing the Confessions he considered these convictions to be a fitting prelude, historically or philosophically, to the formulation of the argument that we are undertaking to study. [end of page 23]
sums up his own reaction: If the Manichaeans should call God's substance incorruptible, then their whole position would be false and detestable (exsecrabilia) but if they should call it corruptible, that statement in itself would already be false and from the very start abominable (abominandum). Since this second alternative, Augustine indicates, would be the only way in which they could continue to maintain their basic teachings, they could not escape from the dilemma without committing a terrible sacrilege of heart and tongue. The unusually strong language he uses here, in applying the terms "abominable" and "terrible sacrilege" to the view that God's substance might be considered corruptible, shows how deep-seated and strongly felt was his conviction that the attribute of incorruptibility surely, one might almost say above all, must not be denied of God. [end of page 24]
numerable passages in the Confessions and other works to substantiate this; but most striking is the one that immediately follows his recalling the anti-Manichaean argument of Nebridius, where he tells graphically of his search for the cause of evil. He held firmly at the time in question that God, the true God, is incorruptible, unalterable, and in every way unchangeable. Though he had not yet arrived at the cause of evil, he knew that he could not seek it in such a way as to believe the unchangeable God changeable, lest he himself become the very thing he was trying to explain, namely, evil. This knowledge gave him the confidence and the certainty that the Manichaeans were wrong; for be had seen them, searching for the cause of evil, full of evil spite themselves, thinking, that the substance of God suffered evil rather than that their own committed evil. He then outlines his first attempts to find the origin of evil in the free will, but tells how he was unable to reconcile this with the goodness of God. Despite his great discouragement, however, he was not cast down into the hell of error where no one confesses to God, thinking that God suffers evil rather than that man commits it.45 [end of page 25]
Greek philosophers, both pagan and Christian. As for the principle that whatever is best belongs to God, we can see this operating in a sense as far back as the earliest Greek literature; in particular, the notion of that which is fitting or proper to God, employed in an increasingly philosophical way by Xenophanes and Plato, reaches a climax in the "God-befitting" of Gregory of Nyssa. The acceptance of incorruptibility as such a perfection has its roots in the very origins of philosophy itself, namely, in the search for something that abides amid the coming to be and passing away of everything in the world around us. Terms like "unalterable" and "impassive" become standard predicates of the first principle early in Greek thought. This general tendency of philosophy is given a special direction by the dialectical use of the good as a first principle by Plato, ;especially in the Timaeus and the Republic,46 and by the subsequent metaphysical use of the good in Plotinus. In Plotinus a moral force is also attached to the good, that which is farthest removed from change and corruption, in his explanation of evil, and this is taken over and considerably amplified by the Christian philosophers, who, like Gregory, must deal with the problem of sin and salvation, that is, with the moral significance of the corruptible and the incorruptible, such as we meet it in Augustine. [end of page 26]
doctrine of Plotinus on this point, despite a different understanding of what the freedom of the first principle means, is reflected in the Christian predecessors of Augustine. [end of page 27]
are found in the Stoics, are widely reflected in poetry and other non-philosophical literature. In Plotinus, as one would expect, the power of the first principle is absolute.51 This is true also for the Christian philosophers, though their view of the divine omnipotence Is naturally affected by their conception of a very personal God; and even before Augustine they encounter problems, such as are doubtless in the mind of Plato, in reconciling God's omnipotence with the existence of evil. [end of page 28]
of God. All in all, there was no paucity of materials available to Augustine in constructing his argument for the incorruptibility of God. [end of page 29]
beauty is fittingly attributed to goddesses. On the other hand, since Xenophanes is rebelling against this anthropomorphism, and especially against el the excessive motion that seems to him to characterize the gods of the poets, he criticizes this motion as unfitting and offers in turn a conception of God as ruling the universe with majestic immobility through the power of thought alone. [end of page 30]
terms other than the partly or wholly mechanistic ones of most of his predecessors, sets it within a framework of reason and goodness, asking us, in the myth of the Timaeus, to view it as proceeding from the ordering hand of a divine craftsman, who it would be impious to think is other than good, and who holds back nothing within his power from his handiwork in a spirit of envy. This account is supplemented by that of the Republic in which the idea of the good is elevated to the highest position, placed even "on the other side of being.56 The Platonic good is crystallized in the transcendent good of Plotinus, which is complete and self-sufficient, lacking nothing and communicating the overflow of its perfection to all things.57 This principle is likewise the most perfect unity, even going beyond intelligence, in which we are able to distinguish the duality of knower and known. The cause for Plotinus must always be simpler than the effect, and so the first cause must be the simplest of all.58 But it is not called one in the sense that unity is predicated of something other than itself, as happens in our experience of unity. No name, he says, is truly proper [Greek text ...] to it; but, since we must call it by some name, we may properly [Greek text ...] call it "one" with the necessary reservations.59 [end of page 31]
of the ontological argument, as indeed he precedes him shortly in time. He is constantly making explicit use, as we have seen, of the principle that whatever is better or greater is in God, or that whatever is better in our conception or in the meaning of a term must be considered as belonging to God. Most significant perhaps from our point of view is his interest in what is meant by the term "God," with the complementary statement that a perfection must belong to God truly, not just in name. (Is he here anticipating that aspect of Anselm's argument that seemed to Aquinas an illegitimate passing from the mind to reality?) He also offers examples of the corresponding negative position, namely, that if some perfection is lacking the being in question cannot be God. [end of page 32]
as a whole regarding a single perfection of God. On the other hand, Gregory's statement (again composite) that if a perfection is lacking we are clearly not dealing with God is expressed by Augustine in saying that if God were not incorruptible then he could think of some other being that was better than God. But this negative position enters Augustine's argument in such a way that it occupies the chief place, and indeed through it, and only through it, is the other, more positive position expressed. That is to say, Augustine does not declare in so many words that God as the best conceivable being must be incorruptible; he says rather that if He were not incorruptible then we could think of another being better than He is, though we really know that God is indeed the best conceivable being. It is this absurdity into which we are led that constitutes the argument in Augustine. Though all the materials for the argument have been provided for him by the tradition of which he is a part, it is he who has devised its distinctive form. [end of page 33]
could think of an incorruptible being that would be better. Above all, in both thinkers the essence of the argument consists in pointing out the absurdity that one falls into when the perfection in question is denied of the being that is held to be the best or the greatest that can be thought. [end of page 34]
rise above and pronounce judgment on the creator, which is completely absurd.63 In this sentence Anselm shifts from "greater" (maius), which he has used constantly to this point, to the "better" (melius) of Augustine, and the construction, changing to the active voice, becomes very similar to one of Augustine, "some mind" taking the place of "any soul" as the subject. It is even possible that when Anselm speaks of the creature rising above the creator to sit in judgment on Him he is offering a more dramatic version of the corresponding statement Augustine makes, namely, that he could have reached something in his thought that was greater than God (if God were not incorruptible).64 Finally, Anselm's characterization of the opposing position as contradictory (convenire non potest) and completely absurd (valde absurdum) makes explicit for the first time the reductio ad absurdum which is the foundation, not only of the two arguments Anselm has just used, but also of their prototype in Augustine. [end of page 35]
similarity of the arguments of the two men, Anselm did not have the text of Augustine before him (and this indeed makes the similarity more striking). He was so well acquainted with the works of Augustine over a long period of time that Augustinian modes of argumentation and even choice of words had become second nature to him. The struggles he relates so graphically of the argument's attempts to come to the surface of his mind were, to a considerable extent, an effort on his part to bring to bear on the problem he faced all his resources, natural and acquired, and the latter were, directly or indirectly, strongly Augustinian. The form the argument took, when it finally came to birth, was the one that had been given to it by Augustine, though its antecedents are much older. Anselm gave this form a new- content, that of God's existence. But the notion that only God truly is is also readily available in Augustine (as well as iii Gregory and many others, who employed both philosophical and scriptural reasons to support this position; and it comes ultimately from Greek thinkers who knew nothing of the Scriptures. ) [end of page 36]
a long tradition before him. In the entire process by which the ontological argument came finally to be formulated there are at least three well-defined stages. In the first of these, of which Gregory of Nyssa may be taken as representative, a number of notions about God that had been developed during the whole course of Greek philosophy are articulated and applied to the great problem of fusing the philosophical and scriptural heritages amid a heightened awareness of the propriety or impropriety of conceptions and of terms, especially as these have reference to God. So we find, in particular, two Gregorian and generally Greek principles carefully formulated and constantly employed, namely, that all perfection belongs to God, and whatever being is imperfect or inferior cannot be God. Next Augustine combines these two principles and fashions from them his argument for God's incorruptibility, based, as we noted, on a reductio ad absurdum. Finally Anselm takes the Augustinian form and gives it a new content, which is itself to be found in Augustine and in others as well. [end of page 37]
of Parmenides, who strikes the keynote for an entire tradition of philosophical and theological thinking when he declares that what can be spoken and thought must be. Such a view takes over the pre- or the nonpbilosophical category of the "God-befitting," which seems in Xenophanes also to have achieved some philosophical significance, and applics it in the strictest sense to that which truly is. Thus Parmenides' description of that which is and of the attributes that belong to it could never be forgotten from that point forward by philosophers of the western world when they spoke of God, and in particular not by those who belonged to the tradition which we liave been discussing. The use made of his principle by Parmenides himself shows that the mind is not intended by him to establish arbitrary correspondences between itself and reality. But h& and the tradition of which he is a part insist that when the mind is operating at the highest level of its activity, that is, on the highest objects of its knowledge, then there is a correspondence between thought attd reality. Thus we have the preoCcupation with true, that is, suprasensible being as the proper object of the intellect in a certain group of philosophers, and the eventual result of this preoccupation is the argument of Anselm. It is not accidental that Augustine, in the course of his argumentation, declares that no soul ever was able or will be able to think of anything which is better than God, and, a little later, that he himself would have been able to reach in thought something which was better than God if God were not incorruptible. This is the same interest in the conception we have of God already
[end of page 38]
noted in Gregory of Nyssa, and it is clearly reflected in the terminology of Anselm. [end of page 39]
speak merely of various levels of being. At the same time in the Christian philosophers this attention to "life" is focused more and more on man and the moral problems he faces during his sojourn on earth. This anthropocentrism affects the use of the traditional contraries in such a way that the opposition is frequently limited to God and man as the two levels of life which are most relevant; and the Platonic statement from the Theaetetus (176B) that man should try to become like God by becoming just and holy and wise is constantly reaffirmed and reinterpreted within a Christian context.67 [end of page 40]
his own corruptibility is equated with becoming, it is natural that the divine incorruptibility should be equated with being. Have we not here a moral counterpart to the Timaeus of Plato? Instead of the cosmic opposition of being and becoming we are given the opposition, equally cosmic but in a moral universe, of the incorruptible and the corruptible. Instead of an imitation of being by the world of becoming that depends entirely on the activity of a divine craftsman we are given an imitation, or a hoped-for imitation, of the incorruptible by the corruptible that depends in large measure-and this is the chief difference-on the free choice and cooperation of the corruptible itself. Just as Plato employs the phenomena of the physical world to create a dialectical universe in which reason bends the blind forces of necessity to its own purposes, so Augustine applies his dialectic to the events of his personal life to create a moral universe in which he, under the providence of God, brings the blind forces within his own nature under the control of reason. Within this universe, just as his own corruptibility is becoming, so incorruptibility is being. It is the standard by which his actions are seen to be wanting and the ideal towards which he is or should be striving. But the incorruptible, he also perceived in some way, is the cause of the corruptible, and this offered a special problem of its own. Some philosophers have found an "ontological scandal," as it has been called, in the very existence of becoming in the face of being. So Augustine, like many another, found a moral scandal in the existence of the corruptible when he knew that incorruptibility exists.
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this may be found in other philosophers who argue to God's existence, as in the five ways Thomas Aquinas employs to prove God's existence. He proves that there is a prime mover and adds that all men understand this to be God; and to the proofs that there is a first efflcient cause, and so on, he makes similar additions.69 So for Augustine, though his method of proof is, of course, not the a posteriori one of Aquinas, the existence of incorru tibility is proved within the moral universe of search and suffering, and this is called by the name of God. [end of page 43]
of Him as the best possible being, is there any reason, apart from one of convention, why we should withhold the name "ontological" from it? (It goes without saying that the name we give the argument has nothing to do with our accepting or rejecting it, since even the opponents of Anselm's argument may call it 61 ontological. ") We should not think, for example, that Augustine is merely declaring that a God whose existence he has already proved is to be given the attribute of incorruptibility. There is no indication that this argument is dependent on any other, and indeed such a view would be imposing on Augustine something like the Thomistic method, whereby a perfaction like incorruptibility is attributed to God only after His existence has been proved. The existence of incorruptibility, which, since it is taken in a substantial sense, is identical with God, is the goal of tbig single argument, and it is not intended to depend on any other, just as Anselm in his preface indicates is true of his argument.70 The use of the term "incorruptibility" instead of "being" or "existence" should not rule out the name "ontological," since incorruptibility is the existence that Augustine arrives at by reasoning within his moral universe out of the depths of the human situation in which he is immersed. In these days one would even be tempted to add that an argument having such an origin as this is more deserving of the name "ontological," if this may mean "existential," than one that is so abstract as that of Anselm, lacking as it does the clear-cut marks of the human condition that characterize the argument of Augustine.71 [end of page 44]
easy to think that Anselm's argument, because of its explicitness and abstractness, is a more fully developed and therefore a more perfect version of Augustine's, we may also look on it in another way. By its very abstractness has it not also lost some of the power that is found in the more concrete argument of Augustine? Even without Anselm's own description of how his argument originated we can think of Augustine's argument as lying in a half active, half dormant state within Anselm's spirit for a long time. But when it finally emerges into the light of day it has left behind the elements that make Augustine's argument really "existential," because it has been filtered through a mind that is relatively untouchedas far as our evidence goes-by temptation and moral upheaval. [end of page 45]
re ality is necessarily a partial one. But. it overlooks the integral nature of a well-constructed philosophy and the likelihood that any individual doctrine will stand or fall with the whole approach to which it belongs. Gilson, in one of his many perceptive discussions of Augustine's method, remarks that it opens the way for Anselm's metaphysical speculations, which seek to discover the existence of God in the very idea we have of Him. He adds-possibly not having in mind the passage from the Confessions-that, while Augustine does not develop the proof of Anselm himself, he is certainly proceeding in a direction that in the normal course of events leads to that proof.73 As Gilson suggests, there was a certain inevitability that after an Augustine an Anselm or Anselms would sometime come: along. And it was just as inevitable that there would be others to oppose them. For every Anselm, like Bonaventure and Descartes, who steps on the stage, there is a Gaunilo, like Aquinas or Kant, lurking in the wings, and there is no reason to believe that this will not always be so. [end of page 46]
which surrounds a philosophical work may give us highly relevant information about the precise meanings and associations of the terms the philosopher employs and about his characteristic method of philosophizing. But in our study of philosophical atmosphere is it not also profitable to go beyond the works of the philosopher himself and examine his position in relation to his predecessors and even his successors? Proceeding in this spirit we have seen, I think, how the argument for God's existence that we call ontological not only follows in a direct line from an argument of Augustine, but indeed may in a very real sense be considered his discovery. [end of page 47]
western thought. We are told by a sceptic of the second century after Christ, Sextus Empiricus, that Aristotle traced men's thought about the gods back to two sources, phenomena of the soul [Greek text ...] and of the heavens; for, regarding the soul, when it is separated from the body in sleep or at the moment of death it assumes its true nature and foresees the future, as we see in Homer. For these reasons men came to suspect that something divine existed, something that was like [Greek text ...] the soul and of all thins the most knowing. 75 [end of page 48]
more directly to its rightful home.76 A fragment from the fifth-century lyric poet Pindar offers the earliest statement of this new view of the nature of the soul. He says that, while the body of every man is subject to overpowering death, a living image [Greek text ...] of life survives, since it alone comes from the gods. It sleeps while the limbs are active, but to those who are asleep it reveals in many a dream the joys and sorrows that are to come.77 Many beliefs and practices similar to those of the Orphics were adopted by the Pythagoreans of southern Italy and joined with their philosophical and scientific studies to form a special "way of life," in which great stress was laid on the purification of the soul. Empedocles likewise, alongside his poem On nature, has set forth in the Purifications, also in poetic form, how the "spirit" or "demigod" [Greek text ...] has defiled itself and been banished from the seats of the blessed to wander for thrice ten thousand years and be born in the course of time inIs I all kinds of shapes of mortal things. "Of their number," he says, "I too am now one, an exile from the gods and a wanderer."78 [end of page 49]
for which he takes over the name of "soul," being influenced doubtless in so doing by the usefulness he found in the religious conception of the soul, makes man a moral agent responsible in some measure for his own fate, and it must be given the most careful attention by him throughout his life. The type of purification of the soul that Plato himself has in mind may be illustrated by the passage from the Theaetetus ( 176A-B) already referred to: Since evils cannot exist among the gods, but hover always around mortal nature and this earth, we should try to flee from here to there as quickly as possible; this flight consists in becoming like God as far as we can, and to become like Him is to become just and holy and wise. This kind of moral exhortation- underlies the Platonic use of the Orphic 'or another religious psychology and eschatology, which there is no reason for taking literally, whether expressed by Plato in an@obvious myth or otherwise. If one takes it literally, in whole or in part, then it is easy to. construct "the religion of Plato," though this is likely to be at the expense of Plato's philosophy and his sense of philosophical method. The words placed by Plato in Socrates' mouth in these matters may even be sceptical: The doctrine of the mysteries that men are in a kind of prison and must not try to escape is not easy for him to understand (Phaedo 62B); to maintain that the stories of the after-life are just as he has recounted them would not be fitting for a man of good sense (Phaedo 114D).79 But one can still say that the philosopher practices for death all his life (Phaedo 64A), and by the philosophical import of this Plato indicates that, like the
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Pythagoreans, he has in his own way made philosophy a way of life."80 [end of page 51]
many allusions Plotinus makes in this treatise to the mysteries. ) Let him who is able search for it within leaving outside the vision of his bodily eyes. Let our flight be to our beloved fatherland, he exclaims) employing an expression from Homer, a flight like that made by Odysseus from the enchantress Circe or from Calypso, despite all their brandishments. Oulfatherland is there whence we have come, and oul' father too is there. But what form of travel can ouiflight take? We cannot rely on our feet, which take us from one place to another; nor is there any need to make ready a carriage drawn by horses or a sailin" vessel. We must dispense with all these and close our eyes, waking in ourselves another kind of seeing [Greek text ...], which all men possess but few men employ ( I - 6. 8).81 We must withdraw into ourselves and see where we are lacking in beauty within, and then rid ourselves of every imperfection. When we have done this and become pure vision itself, then, with no further need for a guide, we gaze intently and see. For this is the only eye that looks. ppon the real beauty (I. 6. 9). [end of page 52]
ences. Augustine, for example, omits the reference to Odysseus as a symbol of the soul's flight from this world, and, after dispensing with the ordinary modes of travel for this kind of flight, just as Plotinus does, he introduces the faculty of will (voluntas) where the problem for Plotinus was one of seeing [Greek text ...].83 We must indeed agree with Father Henry's emphasis on the importance of the will for Augustine; in the sentence in question it is repeated in such a way that there can be no room for misunderstanding. For in regard to the goal he was seeking, he tells us of the scene in the garden, to go in that direction and even to arrive there required only that he have the will to go, but a will that was vigorous and whole, not what was in fact a half-wounded will, tossing this way and that, divided in the struggle of one part with another. [end of page 53]
in his sermon On Isaac or the soul, which Augustine may have heard in 386; but in the first book of the Confessions he notes that Augustine adapts the passage of Plotinus to the parable of the prodigal son.84 What we might add is that Augustine's discussion of the problem he found in his own will is not in his Ambrosian model any more than it is in Plotinus. Ambrose, followine, the lead of Plotinus, says that the flight cannot be made on foot, and so on, but should be made with the mind and indeed, he adds ratlier quaintly, with the inner eyes or feet. Where Augustine says that his will should be vigorous and whole (velle fortiter et integre), Ambrose applies similar words to seeing (sanus et vigens oculus), just as Plotinus does;85 and in the whole passage of Ambrose, which abounds in allusions to vision, there is not one mention of the will.86 [end of page 54]
however, to ascribe originality to someone in matters of this kind, since we can never be sure of many of the elements involved in his intellectual and moral history, even when he reports them to us with the studiousness of an Augustine. In this instance I should like to suggest that Augustine is not the first to interject the parable of the prodigal son or the problem of the will into a discussion of the flight of the soul, and he is not original in this respect, at least in the way in which originality mi, t commonly be understood. On both of these points he has been anticipated by Gregory of Nyssa. [end of page 55]
spontaneously from an earthly to a heavenly existence. For the distance from the human to the divine is not one of space, so as to require some device by which to transfer this heavy and earthy flesh to an immaterial and spiritual manner of life. But rather, since the distance between virtue and vice is an intelligible one, it lies in man's will alone to take him to any place to which his desire is directed. Since there is no toil attached to choosing the good, and the choice leads at once to the attainment of what was chosen, it lies in our power to be in heaven immediately by holding God in our thought. When we are bidden, therefore, to call God our Father, this is nothing else than a command to become like our heavenly Father through a God-befitting mode of life.88 [end of page 56]
land, a characteristically Plotinian expression (thoug h "fatherland" in a similar sense appears in Hebrews I 1. 14). The flight we are speaking of is not in any way spatial, so that we do not have t find any device 0 [Greek text ...] by which to accomplish it. As a result Gregory tends to look at the flight, at least in part, in the intellectual manner of Plotinus. We have only to grasp God in our thought in order to be spontaneously and without further effort transported to heaven. Yet there is more for Gregory than the intellect involved in this thought. There is an act of will, a choice to be made [Greek text ...], and it lies within our power Lp [Greek text ...] whether our thought will take us heavenward or leave us amid the evils of the world. [end of page 57]
it is this, after all, that constitutes the flight of the soul clh for them, as it does earlier for Plato. One must admit, on the one hand, that there is considerable basis for the statements of Father Henry when he contrasts the proud rationalism of Plotinus, who has only to close his eyes to the outside world and awaken a sleeping power within himself, and the almost anguished Christianity of Augustine, who must bend his will under the yoke, and break the resistance of a nature that is wounded and divided against itself before he can win the struggle.90 Yet, on the other hand, if we look at the larger picture presented by Plotinus, there are indications that he was not unaware of the serious problems involved in moral progress; and this is even truer of Gregory. But the fact is that in presenting their; versions of the flight of the soul, whether this is understood as seeing or as willing, they have not touched on the real difficulties as an t an isolated Augustine would see them. This is no instance in their philosophies, since they do not offer anywhere his kind of approach to the role played by the will in spiritual progress. But that is in itself a large topic that we cannot take into account here. [end of page 58]
where he states that there is only one way, since Christ has said, "I am the way."). Each person is able, he says, to take hold of wisdom according to his own health and vigor (sanitate ac firmitate), and, describing it as a kind of light, he goes on to speak of it in terms of sight and the sun (1. 13. 23). We should flee utterly from sensible things;91 we have need of wings that are whole and perfect (integris perfectisque) in order to fly92 to that light out of the darkness in which we now live (l. 14. 24). Just as the bodily eye cannot look upon the sun unless it is healthy (sanus), so it is with the soul, which is often deceived recarding its own health ( 1. 14. 25 ). This intellectual interpretation of the soul's flight is found also in the work Against the Academics, written in the same period. The soul, he says, expects to overcome all deception and, by grasping the truth and returning, as it were, to its place of origin (quasi in regionem suae originis rediens), to triumph over the passions; it expects thus that by espousing temperance it will be the ruler, and it is less concerned about its return to heaven (securior. rediturus in coelum) (2. 9. 22).93 (In the Retractations 1. 1. 3 Augustine says that it would have been safer to speak of going (iturus) than of returning (rediturus) to heaven, since in this way he would not have given the impression of accepting the doctrine that the soul, having fallen or been cast down from heaven because of its sins, has been thrust into the body.)94 [end of page 59]
unchangeably wise life is to be placed ahead of that which is changeable, he says that the one who does not see this is like the blind man in the full light of the sun, while the one who sees the answer to this question but runs away from it has a spiritual vision that has been blunted by the continued presence of shadows arising from the flesh. Men are therefore driven away from their very fatherland by what we might call the contrary winds of corrupt habits; they pursue the lower though they recognize that there is If one is going to enjoy something higher (1. 9. 9). the unchanging truth, the soul must be purified so as to be able to see that light and, once seen, cleave to it. This purification should be thought of as a kind of walking or sailing toward the fatherland; to Him who is everywhere present we do not move by change of place, but by good inclination (studio) and good habits (1. 10. 10).95 Here Augustine, though retaining a basically intellectual interpretation of the soul's flight, sets clearly apart, those men who see the light but abandon it. He recognizes that through moral what he knows to be depravity a man may pursue inferior, and that to move toward the fatherland is a matter of inclination and character. This tendency toward a moral interpretation of the soul's flight points to the Confessions, written probably not much later, that the problem of the and it is in the Confessions will comes to the fore. [end of page 60]
are not required, but the two wings of charity, namely, love of God and love of neighbor. This definitely non-intellectual interpretation of the flight of the soul adopted by Augustine in his maturity is supplemented by a passage from the City of God (9. 17), in which Plotinus is quoted by name. We must flee, then, says Augustine, to the most beloved fatherland. There is the Father, and there is everything. What kind of fleet (classis) can we employ, what means of flight (fuga)? To become like God. Augustine goes on to say that the only distance from God is unlikeness to Him, and the soul is more unlike the eternal and the unchangeable the more it seeks after temporal and changing things. To heal this illness-since the mortal and impure found in the lowest cannot fittingly belong (convenire non possunt) to the immortal purity that is in the highest-there is need of a mediator. This mediator cannot have a diseased mind such as belongs to those on the lowest level, for then he would through envy begrudge our being healed instead of helping us to be healed. But he must, by the immortal justice of the spirit, through which he remains on the highest level-not by spatial distance (locorum distantia), but by the excellence of likeness-offer truly divine aid for our purification and liberation. [end of page 61]
of the flight as a vision to a consideration of the will's function in making the joumey. We cannot easily think that the reason for the change in Augustine's attitude lay primarily in the events themselves which he. interprets for us in the Confessions, since these events, at least those that are relevant, had already taken place when he wrote the two earlier works. The reason is rather to be sought in the mental development that occurred in the intervening time, as a result of which he came to apply the theme of the flight in a very personal way to his own life, and especially to the problems, which he analyzed with great care and clarity, of his will. In this process was Augustine aided inspired by anything he read or heard of during or these years? If we are guided by his earlier treatment of the flight, and, by what w'e know of his method of writing in general, it is easy to believe that there were various influences operating in his life which he used in his own way. The passage of Grego . ry discussed above offers itself as one possibility-even though at this moment there is no-historical evidence that Augustin& had any contact with it-since it brings together in a very natural way a number of features that turn up in Augustine's later handling of the flight of the soul. [end of page 62]
the ancient theme. The entrance of the prodigal son into Gregory's exegesis of the Lord's Prayer is most appropriate, since the words uttered by the wayward youth regarding his sin against heaven and against his father have a ready association with the opening of the prayer, and both of these in turn suggest the traditional fatherland and the return that consists in becoming like God. A conception like that of the prodigal son is found also in Plotinus,96 and it is not unlikely that Gregory's acquaintance with Plotinus suggested to him the use of the scriptural counterpart. In Augustine, on the other hand, the Plotinian theme of the flight is employed to express, not the return to God, but his distance from God at the time; and there are other notions from the same passage of Plotinus in the preceding context of Augustine: the bottomless abyss (inmanissimo profundo) and the darkness of ignoble desire (affectu tenebroso). The prodigal son enters only in the midst of the enumeration of the possible ways of approaching or leaving God. Having said that not on foot or by any spatial distance does anyone leave God or return to Him, he adds that the prodigal son (filius ille tuns minor) did not seek horses, and so on, for his departure. Augustine has not so much adapted the theme of flight to the parable of the prodigal son, as Courcelle describes it,97 as he has fitted the prodigal son into the flight, making him the substitute for Odysseus. Now such a substitution would not be very difficult for a Christian writer Of some imagination. But the fact is that an association between the prodigal son and the flight of the soul had already been made by at least one predecessor of
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Augustine, and in a way, one might add, that arises most naturally out of the whole context. In Augustine, on the other hand, there seems to be no strong motivation of an intrinsic nature for the introduction of the prodigal son at this particular place. In fact, his arrival on the scene is abrupt and his presence rather casual. The earthly father is not mentioned because he is merged with the heavenly Father, who is addressed by Augustine as the kind Father who had been generous to the youth on his setting out and a kinder Father when he returned in his hour of need. This easy merging of the two fathers suggests that Augustine has in mind a passage, such as that of Gregory, in w ich the merging is more careful and deliberate, one in which the kindness of the father on the return of the son is emphasized, as indeed it is at some length in Gregory. |
