Saint Augustine on Knowledge and Reality by Leonard Peikoff

the most famous of the fathers was August II 354 to 430 ad Augustine early in his life belonged to one particular sect known as the mana keys about which I'll comment in a few minutes then he became a skeptic for a while just on the order of the ones we mentioned last lecture then he discovered Platonists and he was very much taken by Platonists and that softened him up for a mystic experience which he had at the age of 32 and he became a devout Christian thereafter Augustine represents the first real philosopher of Christianity he is enormous ly influential on its subsequent development indeed I would go so far as to say that his influence simply cannot be overestimated he attends to synthesize all the dogmas and practices of Christianity in one all-embracing philosophy which became for centuries the philosophy of Christianity so let us settle down now on Augustine and look at his philosophy systematically with occasional excursions were necessary to earlier or later figures of this era and first his epistemology in general Augustine follows Plato strictly speaking he says we can never have knowledge of this world this world is a world of change the world of flaps to knowledge must be of immutable truths and platonic forms knowledge is of reality what of this semi real reflection of reality in which we live and which we perceive to our senses the information we acquire from the senses he says has practical value in daily living well strictly speaking it never gives us knowledge because as Plato pointed out all we can get through the senses is belief well if to knowledge for Augustine as for Plato consists of turning away from the physical world and sensory observation and studying immutable truths and platonic forms that of course implies that Augustine endorsed Plato's view over realm of forms and so he did as a Christian however he didn't believe that the world of forms existed independently of God because on Christian premises not can exist independent of God so Argos team followed Platonists on this point and thought of the forms as merely thoughts in the mind of God God's mind becomes an effective spiritual home in which reside all the platonic forms to knowledge consist of turning away from this world and discovering the forms in God's mind now for Augustine when you study mathematics or morality for instance you are studying unchanging in universal laws or truths and that means you are studying the relations of immutable universals and that means you are studying the thoughts of God so in effect mathematics ethics etc are branches of divine psychology if there were no God there would be no such subjects indeed there would be no knowledge at all it would be like Plato without the world before now how do you gain this knowledge of the thoughts of God Plato has said you have a reminiscence on a preceding life that you'd been there Augustine is not permitted to take this view on Christian grounds it is orthodoxy that there was no pre-existence of the store but then we have the question if we can't gain the knowledge of God's thoughts through our senses and we have no means of direct access to God's thought here on earth how is knowledge possible Augustine's answer is God Himself must communicate the truths to us he must impress certain basic notions on the human mind and thereby enable man to discover the truth man therefore is ultimately dependent on God for all knowledge he's dependent on a special act of divine illumination as it is called illumination my quote knew me Gnaeus another figure of the period quote all knowledge is the killing of the small light from the great light who illumines the world unquote in this respect man is epistemological passive and helpless dependent on God's act for any knowledge he has left to his own devices deprived of God's aid man could claim nothing as knowledge now in fundamental terms as you see this is the Platonic approach to epistemology knowledge is contact with the supernatural dimension of essences it is not the study of this world on the basis of Sense experience what Plato was a Greek and as such he held that given your pre existence in the world of forms you didn't once you were on earth need any new illumination from the beyond sense perception and reasoning to stimulate your reminiscence was all it was required on earth culminating of course in a mystic vision Augustine makes men much more helpless much more dependent on the supernatural than Plato ever dreamed of doing as a Greek you see Plato had to see firsthand he had to acquire truth by a personal excursion before this life of course but nevertheless a personal excursion to the world of forms to see for himself and acquire knowledge he could trust I've seen in a much more religious age demands acceptance of God's illumination of God's Word if as is the case you have no way to verify it yourself he demands acceptance on faith Plato asks for individual mystic in sight but not faith in somebody else's revelations Augustine demands faith faith as such acceptance of God's Word as reported in Scripture now I may say here parenthetically that I think Augustine is the more consistent of the two on their common premises because they both agree Plato and Augustine that man is a metaphysical dependent simply a shadow or image of another world well then inconsistency he must be an epistemological dependent also in other words dependent upon divine illumination for all knowledge play or tries to combine the Greek first handed rational epistemological independence with the metaphysics which subverts the individual Augustine is more consistent in metaphysics man is a shadow and in epistemology his duty is to accept the word of the true reality when it is delivered to him his duty is to have faith so Augustine's epistemology is the Platonic line combined with a sense of the acute helplessness and utter dependence of man anger the more distinctively Christian side comes out therefore an Augustine's discussion of faith which means belief or acceptance in the absence of understanding of rational evidence or proof Alison's main point is in regard to faith that no man can set his own reason up as a judge of the truth or falsehood of Christian teachings to do so would be to rely on one's puny intellect and commit the sin of intellectual pride that which God has revealed to man must be accepted on faith it must never be doubted it must be a sensitive because it comes from God even if you don't understand why it's true once one has done this once one starts with the faith one should things as Augustine go on and try to make sense try to understand but this is the proper procedure and order of a choir Nolan's first belief and then try so far as you can to understand quote in a famous line quote one must first believe in order that one may then know unquote you see the rational policy would of course be the exact reverse of that and if you can understand fine give thanks to God if not recognize your limitations recognize that God's truth is rational and he could illuminate you with the answers if he chose but if he doesn't choose you have no grounds to object knowledge is sometimes given to the Augustine and his followers and predecessors who take this line they regard the process of acquiring knowledge like a student with a math text the answers are written at the back of the text you take the answer is given and trying to work it out if you can reach the answer in the back fine if you can't you start over and you say I must be doing something wrong because I knew the answer in advance and of course in this text there's no misprint God printed the answer system in this respect philosophy is the handmaiden of theology the rationalize er of theology they say this is a fundamental contrast with the most mystical even of the Greece even with platini's now I know it here in passing that anti rationalize this attitude is other Christians took an even more anti Reason view Augustine at least held that God's revelations are intelligible in theory if only God gave us the necessary illumination and that we should try to make sense of them others however L that the basic tenets of Christianity were inherently irrational contradictory and preposterous other believing Christians and indeed they held their preposterous this was the sure sign that they were true I mentioned in passing Tertullian ter tu ll I am who is second a third century AD one of the Fathers of the Church he was asked about a certain Christian dogma in which he devoutly believed did he think it makes and he replied in a famous line credo quia absurdum I believe it because it is absurd it is certain because it is impossible in other words he was putting it as strong away as he could the idea that he is having no truck with reason reason is the corrupt distorting the element and if this view is irrational that's good grounds to think it's true this is always taken as an overt anti reason manifesto and it of course is the version of May of early Christianity that the existentialist today most admire they find their inspiration not in Augustine whom they regard as too rational but in Tertullian this is explicit now let's look at Augustine's metaphysics here the central concept is Augustine's concept of God which is a mixture of many elements as you would expect God is in part and infinite mind containing the Platonic forms so today I say he's like platanus is divine mind Agustina describes him as fully real of course God is the only fully real entity he is immutable perfect cetera he's just like Plato's other world or like the form of the good but that is not all he is because this is a religion now and consequently God can't be just a neutral platonic set of universes he must be given a personality then so Augustine describes him as a living knowing willing being all-powerful all-knowing all good the father of his children who loves them who protects them who judges them who sends his son down to help them etc now most of this is straight out of the mystery cults of the time and it's largely the primitive Judaic inheritance not nearly as sophisticated as the Platonic inheritance now the sides trying to combine God as a neutral platonic world with God as a kind of infinite personality Christianity also had the problem that many of the mystery cults of the period had how to conceive the Trinity the Trinitarian nature of God how to relate God the Father to Jesus the son leaving out the third one now Christian Christianity of course construes Jesus as a divine being the son of God and therefore God himself he was however the son of God and therefore a different God from God the Father so there are now two gods and yet with its Judaic inheritance christianity is committed fervently to monotheism some of the other mystery cults were avowedly polytheistic now this is a terrible problem and it's worse when you add the third member of the Trinity now you have three beings each must be distinct from the other to each our God and yet there's only one girl the ultimate position was adopted formally by the church was that this is a mystery which surpasses human understanding which must be accepted on faith how one can be three and still be one there was a lot of debate about it at the time there were some before the doctrine was finally settled there were some people influenced by the Greek Pro reason view who were trying desperately to make sense of the Trinity and there were others influenced by the primitive Hebraic worship of blind faith and they wanted of our the unintelligible positions and they won up I may say as a parenthetical remark that most of the countless heresies on countless subjects expressed this tension between the Judaic and the Greek influence on Christianity and in every case that I'm familiar with Judaism is the source of the worst most irrational element in Christianity Greek philosophy of the better more irrational elements in any event I don't mean that Judaism is Trinitarian I mean the worship of faith in any event you see now the incredible problem Augustine had with God he has to try to make some kind of coherence if not sense out of a being who has to combine emotionless Neoplatonic divine mind the primitive Judaic loving personal father and the Christian Trinity which isn't isn't three now you can appreciate Augustine's view stated on occasion that God is not really noble or understandable to the human mind the best we can do is approximate its nature in any case God in Augustine's view created this world ex nihilo out of nothing by an act of will at a particular point in time here again is a profound contrast with any Greek view all the Greeks Platonists included believed that the universe was eternal that its constituent elements have always existed here was another case where the Judaic view won out over the Greek and as always it created monumental problems for the Christian the ancient pagans taunted the Christians they asked questions like if God came before the stuff of the universe why did he decide to create it at the particular point in time he did why not sooner why not later what was he waiting around for in effect and why did he choose this particular place to put it in rather than some other one said to me now to answer such questions and for many other reasons as well Augustine advanced a famous theory of the nature of time unfortunately I have no time to present it asking the question period if you're interested but please do because it's important God did create the world ex nihilo at a specific point in time and he did so for a specific purpose God has a plan he runs every aspect of what occurs in the universe as part of his plan indeed according to agustin god alone really has causal efficacy in the universe everything is determined by God for instance in his confessions Augustine remarks when he tells about a journey that he took you might think on the surface that he Augustine decided to take it and he is the real cause of the journey no Augustine says really God behind the scenes wanted Augustine to take it and was responsible for the journey as part of his plan for Augustine all Augustine relates a case where he gets a toothache and explains that God is punishing him in accordance with God's own long-range plan and so on God is responsible for everything which occurs and since he's immutable no changes in his plan are possible it's set and fixed once and for all everything in the word is predestined in accord with this plan and from this aspect Augustine is a rigid religious determinist now this view is best expressed in the following parallel which will give you the feel of this way of looking at the universe the universe on this view is no longer a natural fact no longer a primary no longer intelligible with its own terms it's like a play rather written by God who becomes a cosmic playwright the earth the physical world is the stage man is the chief actor his lines have been written by God who is also the sole spectator the play of taking place once and for all at a certain point he will conclude that's the end of the world the actors will retire for their critical notices now you see the absolute contrast with the Greek view the universe is not eternal not natural not a self intelligible fact but especially created unnatural episode in the scheme of things if you asked a typical Greek for instance in this respect Aristotle what is the meaning of life now if you asked it in a metaphysical not an ethical context if you asked him it eclis and you meant by what should man live for of course you have a lot to say but if you just pointed to the phenomena and said what is this metaphysical or cosmic meaning Aristotle would not understand the question he would point to a rock and say why is the meaning of a rock what do you want it to mean it's there all right but on the Christian view life on Earth is like a play by Shakespeare and it becomes meaningful to ask what does it mean in fact why did the author have a mind on this view the fact of existence is not a primary but a mystery which requires some kind of unraveling everything is a symbol pointing beyond itself to God well to go on we have the problem now of evil in acute form because the question arises why did God include so much evil so much suffering in his play now one sect of the period the manna Keys that's the sect that I mentioned Augustine belonged to as a youth thought that the only solution is to say that God is limited that there is a devil and he is responsible for evil which at least makes a certain kind of sense Christianity repudiated this as heretical it's view is that God is responsible for everything he is all-powerful and even the devil therefore as part of his plan why then does God create or allow evil well part of the time Augustine takes the view that there is no evil if you saw God's ultimate purpose you would see that everything is really good that's a point we discussed last time but much more typically Augustine takes the Neoplatonic solution to the problem of evil your remember evil is the absence of the perfection and reality that is inherent in the creature being non God all things in this world are necessarily infected with deficiency with a metaphysical deficiency because they are part of the semi-real created world if you want to pun but which nevertheless is meant literally here there may out of nothing and therefore there deficient this is harks back to the Platonic view of non-being as the a constituent element of this world and is the source of imperfection God from this point of view couldn't have created a perfect world a world without evil because if you think of him as the source of light we're now at the region where it's dark it follows that all men insofar as there are semi-real members of this semi-real world are also inherently infected with evil men are sinners by nature and they have no choice about it they can do nothing about it on their own their evil is inherent in the metaphysical setup notice here that the church and Augustine accepted this view fully they explicitly denied that man on his own has any choice about being good that it is not an issue up to him he is helplessly evil by birth and that of course is the doctrine of original sin this became official with the condemnation of Pelagius PE L AGI us he was an early 5th century Christian monk Pelagius was and he held that each human soul enters the world since that it has free will is capable on its own of shaping its destiny by its own choices and therefore is responsible for its actions and properly to be judged by God Paul a just denied any intrinsic wickedness in man this view was formally condemned as a heresy and of course is to this day because it made man too independent of God the reasoning was if man could achieve virtue on his own by his own will then virtue would be his accomplishment not gods and it wasn't therefore be true that everything was caused by God and besides the whole Christian scheme of Christ coming to earth and being crucified to redeem man would become unnecessary then if man has free will to achieve virtue on his own he wouldn't need to be saved by divine intercession he wouldn't need any help from beyond hell from the church and yet Christ is supposed to be the savior without which man is lost and it is essential therefore to Christianity this doctrine and therefore Pelagius was condemned and the doctrine was taken that man on his own without help from God is inherently corrupt wicked and helpless he cannot take a step in the direction of virtue on his own now this of course is determinism and Christianity in this respect is fully deterministic freewill is incompatible with man's inherent evil it's incompatible further I might add with God's rigid predestination with the doctrine that only God has causal efficacy that everything's a part of his play and that man is merely a puppet pulled by the strings worked by God if man has free will what happens to this view that God determines everything that occurs to say nothing of what happens to the view that God knows in advance everything that will occur so if Christianity from this point of view is thoroughly deterministic on many counts it is however incapable of accepting determinism consistently for other reasons because if it did how would you praise or blame man how can God hold him responsible hold man responsible for playing the part that God wrote him how can God a hold man responsible for an evil he couldn't have avoided if there's no free well isn't it hopelessly unfair for God to praise and condemn isn't it senseless god to promulgate moral rules isn't it unfair for him to send men to heaven or hell Christianity is therefore caught in a desperate problem there must be absolute determinism there must be free will now if we had several weeks I would indicate some of the devices by which Augustine tried to combine these two to have his freewill about eating it too however we haven't the time and it is not important the fact is there is no possible solution on his premises and every solution Augustine gives he contradicts elsewhere I'll confine myself merely to giving one view of his on this question which he took over in essence from Paul namely at certain points Augustine limits free will to Adam Adam he claims was free to choose whether to obey God or not I had him committed the original sin the first thing and this was then inherited by all of his descendants so now we have no choice but still God validly punishes us because our first ancestor sinned volition and this is the line that many many Christians took for instance Milton among many others took it the whole of Paradise Lost is devoted to elaborating this view of the solution to the problem of freedom it is of course a hopeless solution because it simply takes the question back to was Adam free in the same considerations as to why no man can have free will on this philosophy apply equally to Adam was it possible for Adam to have used his free will is such as to be perfectly moral and virtuous well if so the neoplatonist answer to evil is wrong that means evil is not inherent in the metaphysical setup if this thing were really Adams then it's not God who is responsible and so God is not the author of everything that occurs and so on and moreover even supposing you solve this problem where is the justice in condemning all men for the sin of one no intelligible answer has ever been given to this that is a which must be accepted on faith on the issues of evil and freedom therefore the upshot is a mass of contradictions in Augustine and in Christians it goes like this God is the cause of everything that's good in fact he's the cause of everything since he is the omnipotent author of every event and yet he is not responsible for evil there's world and man are inherently evil since they're not God and are therefore metaphysically defective semi-real and yet man is responsible for his sins and property to be condemned by God for them man is helpless to be virtuous on his own yet he has to bear responsibility for vices he cannot alter these are the foundations with which we enter ethics but first one crucial metaphysical tenet of Augustine's that I have stated but not yet stressed namely that as a plate inist a neoplatonist Augustine agrees profoundly with Plato and Platanias that this world in which we live is not fully real it is a kind of shadowy reflection of true reality in other words of the realm of God this world is not a solid substantial a real dimension it's hard to communicate this perspective it is the you have to view the world as a region of comparative darkness far removed from the light and perfection which constitutes reality it's like a transitory drifting haze against the solid background of supernatural light if you say you don't agree with this matter is solid it's real it's there Augustine Hanson's in the famous formulation well yes of course matter is there it exists but it is essentially the absence of God so it is prope me here which is Latin for almost nothing that's his definition of matter almost nothing you try to keep this view in mind and you'll have no difficulty grasping Augustine's ethics to which we now turn

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Keywords: history of philosophy, history, philosophy, history of western philosophy, western philosophy, leonard peikoff, ayn rand, ayn rand institute, objectivism, objectivist, political theory, modern philosophy, ancient philosophy, school of life, crash course, lecture, educational video, secular humanism, saint augustine, christian philosophy, christian philosophers, Knowledge and Reality, Neoplatonism, greek neoplatonism

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Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020