Set St. Augustine on fire

Editor’s Note: This is the sixteenth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

A deist, it can be said quite quite Is someone who has not yet found the time to become an atheist. But he will not make a mistake, and on the way he will almost certainly get into agnosticism. It is the simplest and most obvious standard position for intellectually sluggish. I mean, if nobody really knows what God is, we should not even say that there is a god.

Sound sensible? Not if you look at the cumulative wisdom of countless ancestors, including Augustine, who could not imagine a world without God. Only the hypothesis of God makes sense, he and countless others would say uninhibitedly, in the absence no better than the poor Macbeth, for whom life has become “a story of an idiot, full of sound and anger”.

In an elegant little book called The problem of GodMs. John Courtney Murray, SJ, grazes the demands of such people and reveals what he makes a kind of “stupidity” so unique that it would not have dared to defend it in modern times. Agnosticism is not only “an implicit rejection of God,” emphasizes Murray,

it is an explicit denial of intelligence. The essence of God does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, but his existence does not. This is a truth, the Sage of Israel would say, that any man ought to know. It is the first among the truths that no man is allowed not to know, for not to know it is to nullify oneself as a man, a creature of intelligence.

What the Agnostics does is nothing less than to reduce the ramps of reason and to refuse to start looking for truth. In order to despise an exercise that will bear freely the spirit of the threshold of the secret, this is perhaps the most serious violations of the intellect that can be imagined because God is not finally the reach of a person who is ready – even with half a brain – to find evidence for him. If we want to believe Saint Paul, that is, who traveled to the area to give the Greeks – who claimed the reason for heaven's will – the good news that “he is not far from each of us” (Apostle history 17:27). And – o, sweetest Ironien! – It is only to the extent that we live first and move ourselves and have our being in God that we have him free to reject him. “If there was no god,” says Chesterton, “there would be no atheists.”

And finally, how Murray will argue, agnosticism is a kind of despair.

The search for God, says the agnostic, is too perilous for me; it is beyond my powers. In this willful diminution of intelligence, God disappears. Surely this is a miserably flat denouement to the great intellectual drama in whose opening scene Plato appeared with the astonishing announcement that launched the high action of philosophy—his insight that there is an order of transcendent reality, higher than the order of human intelligence and the measure of it, to which access is available to the mind of man.

Augustine would certainly do it I approved Plato. In fact, when he is able to find his works together with the writings of Plotin, his deepest interpreter – “to” get the hidden meaning of Plato out “, he is pleased to find a related spirit, a philosopher who is determined to know the truth as he himself. “To a Christian platonist,” writes Peter Brown, which Augustine seems to have become of the Manicheaner in the period after his vacation and made himself back into a place of reason.

the history of Platonism seemed to converge quite naturally on Christianity. Both pointed in the same direction. Both were radically other-worldly: Christ had said, “My kingdom is not of this world”; Plato had said the same of his realm of ideas. For Ambrose, the followers of Plato were the “aristocrats of thought.” 

But it was never just a proof of the existence of God that brought Augustine on fire; Rather, it was the grace to stay steadfast to the Lord if you fall in love with the Lord. In this regard, neither Plato nor Plotin were helpful because their writings, while their writings of an idea of ​​truth, forever and unchanged – gave sufficient witnesses – have a meaning beyond matter, a Logos Transcendent to all mutations of time and space – there was no lowest incarnation of incarnation, this word of wisdom and comprehensibility that became meat and apartment among us.

Yes, it was deeply depths, and among the many chords played on the Platonist instruments, you could hear distant echo that swinging with the music of the fourth gospel. But Plato's word never appears in the flesh and blood and bones of a human and finite world. God can be Logos for the Greek spirit in its most sublime pitch, but that very much LogosThe soil and the source of being in the world should occur itself, it was simple. LogosYes, but never Sarx.

And not only unthinkable – as it would be a concept that was too complicated to imagine the Greek spirit, to the sensitivity of people, for whom spirit and matter could never come together, was completely undisputed to the sensitivity of men. To look at the face of Jesus and there to save the eternal face of God? It was not just a bridge that was too far to cross the order of the mind, but also to want to want to do this, as if the deepest longings in the heart were supposed to urge one in this direction, such a view remained completely and completely repulsive. For the wisest men in the pagan world, it was the fact of incarnation, not just the idea that would make up the real scandal.

You think here from porphyryFamous student and biographer of Plotinus, who himself had been a Christian so brief; But when he withdrew from experience, he turned his anger to the faith he had rejected. “How can you admit?” Against the Christians“That the divine should become an embryo that he is put into winding clothing after his birth, that it is dirty with blood and bile and worse things?” Which possible agony could be greater, which is more detailed for shameful than the case of a soul in a material body (Soma), which has not become more than a grave now (Sema)? The individuation was a curse for the Platonist spirit, and nothing less than grace will free him from it.

And Augustine? He strives to hug it. “What a great act of her mercy it was,” he will be called and pour out his soul before God, “to show humanity of humility when The The word was made meat and came to housing Among the men of the world. “And while he finds many good things among the Platonist authors, there is nothing that can ultimately satisfy, nothing that can judge the longings of his heart. There is no word among the Platonist authors of the God who came below us and sold himself from his divine dignity to take over the nature of a slave.

In his enthusiastic search for a truth, not only to know, but to love – able to love and loved by Augustine – to be known – reaches for wisdom that is greater than Plato. For this reason, we see Augustine in the end of the book VII, the “the venerable writings that are inspired by their Holy Spirit”, the writings of the apostle Paul, “He teaches that he does not see, not as if he sees, and even the strength he sees sees. Hadn't came to him with a gift. ““ It is the gift of grace that Augustine longs for. Not only that he could be shown how he sees God, but that he gets the strength to adhere to the God he sees.

In the following book, book VIII, the highlight of Augustine's search, which we will see in our next episode.