A READING
GUIDE TO THE ESSENTIAL AUGUSTINE
(ed. V.J. Bourke, Hackett,
1974)
John Kilcullen
Use a strip of paper marked at every second line as a means of counting lines -- p. 13 is a suitable page for marking the strip. The reference "31.16" will mean p. 31, line 16. Lines will be measured from the first line of text on the page, ignoring blank spaces. Thus 31.16 is the line beginning "And so even the very medicine of the soul". "31.16-" means the passage beginning at 31.16. "Cf." means compare. "Para." means paragraph.
REASON AND AUTHORITY
According to Augustine, in matters of religion (and in other matters) we need teaching, and a teacher is an authority. However the goal of teaching is to enable us to know independently. In religion knowledge is possible only to a certain extent in this life; in the next life faith will be replaced by knowledge.
Read para. 31.16-.
Comments:
31.19-21: "Authority demands faith and prepares man for reason. Reason leads him on to knowledge and understanding." To accept the guidance of a teacher is the first step on the way to knowing and understanding the subject for yourself. At first you must have "faith" in the teacher – e.g. read the things the teacher recommends as worth reading, accept the teacher’s explanation of what words mean, etc. After being guided some distance you will know independently and may even reject mistakes of the teacher.
31.21-3: "Reason... helps in considering what authority is to be accepted". You have to have some reason for believing that someone can guide you. This is the problem of the rest of the extract.
Read para. 31.39-.
Comments:
God counsels (advises) individuals in private, and what goes on then the individual knows but no one else can. God also counsels the entire human race. The topic of the rest of the paragraph is to know when that has happened.
32.1-2 Augustine (and the Latins generally) regarded prophecy as a matter of predicting the future. So God teaches all men through historical accounts of the past and predictions about the future. But history and prediction calls for belief – we can’t directly know what happened before our time but must believe historians. But which historians and prophets should we believe?
32.6- Reasons for believing religious teachers who worship one God, and not polytheists.
Read para. 32.24-
Comments:
But those who worship one God do not all agree. Which should we believe? Answer: the Catholic Church, because it started with a few teachers who managed to persuade the whole world.
32.33 Miracles no longer happen.
32.40-44 Compare 31.19-23
32.45 Heresy is the result of pride.
Read para. 24.39-
Comments:
This comes from a work in dialogue form – the "A" at the beginning of the paragraph is the character speaking (Augustine).
This passage again makes the point that faith is the beginning, but the goal is knowledge.
Notice 24.44; cf. the editor’s remarks, 19.21-.
Read para. 26.8-
Comments:
Augustine is writing about the life of a philosophical or religious community – people living together under a set of rules (cf. "follow the precepts of the perfect life", 26.25).
26.13-5, order in time, order in reality: cf. 31.29.
26.20 No unlearned person knows in what quality etc.: To learn from someone you must have the appropriate dispositions. The first thing to learn is how to have the dispositions you need to be teachable ("docile" means teachable). The teacher’s authority is exercised first in getting the pupils into a teachable state, starting with elementary physical things ("Quieten down, listen!"), going on to mental dispositions (e.g. "Read critically"). To be teachable in religious matters requires a whole way of life, "to follow the precepts of the perfect life". The teacher’s authority "opens the door", but at length you will come to know (26.26-).
Read para. 26.36-
Comments:
According to the philosophers the "happy" life is an intellectual life. Similarly, Augustine says that no one can be called happy who lives entirely under authority and never advances much in understanding – but in the next life such a person may achieve happiness.
Read para. 27.1-, and para. 27.10
Comment: This is about deception by evil spirits and how to recognise genuine divine teaching: the former makes great use of "outward manifestations", apparent miracles, and sets great store on them. The latter also exceeds human power in its outward manifestations but shows "how little imporatance it attaches to them"; also, it appeals to understanding, and so on.
Read para. 27.25 on recognising a good human teacher.
Notice in the last two paragraphs that true teaching, both divine and human, advances understanding.
Read pp. 27-31.
What can you glean of Augustine’s biography from this passage?
KNOWLEDGE
Read 34.1-35.3
Comment: Plato was the founder of a philosophical school called "the academy". In the course of time the members of this school became "sceptics", holding that nothing can be known with certainty, everything is doubtful. In this passage Augustine argues that no one can doubt that he is alive. Even if you can be certain of nothing else, you can be certain of that. (This passage anticipates Descartes’ famous argument, "I think, therefore I am".)
Read 35.3-40
Comments:
In fact there is not just one certainty but an infinity.
35.18, "it would be an impudent answer": but it might be true – Augustine does not have any strong reply. Is it possible to think that you want to be happy and yet want to be unhappy? Can you be mistaken in thinking that you don’t want to be mistaken?
Read 35.40-36.26
Comment: Note the three kinds of knowledge mentioned in this passage: knowledge through the senses, knowledge by the mind’s inward reflection, and knowledge through the testimony of other people.
Read para. 35.29-
Comment: Augustine holds that there are "mental" words which do not belong to any particular language (Greek, Latin, English, etc.), which the words of particular languages signify. (Can you have a thought which you have not yet expressed in English words?)
LEVELS OF REALITY
Read para. 45.28-
Comments:
Notice that God is not in space or time; he is immutable and eternal (cf. Boethius).
45.40 "...one... unity": According to the neo-Platonists, something is real insofar as it is one – either simply one, or in the case of complexes one by being unified by some superior principle.
46.5-7 Note "stooping" and "turning", basic neo-Platonic notions.
Read para. 63.39-
Comment: 64.3 "not in time but in origin": cf. 26.13-5, 31.29.
Read para. 64.29-
Comments:
There is no body outside the physical universe (the term "universe" covers every body); but God is not a body and is outside the created universe. He moves bodies, "in such a way that it [the motion] remains entirely natural". God’s action on things is not "violent" or coercive; he acts from within their nature, "since all things are from Him, through Him, and in Him".
Freedom of the will
God moves not only bodies but also created spirits, including ours, including our wills.
Read 61.16-62.7 ("And as to natural causes...").
Comments:
61.35 God acts on the wills of human beings, but not violently or coercively. If we are moved to a choice by God’s influence, the choice still counts as free, as being within our power.
61.30-1, 62.5-7 An efficient cause is something that initiates change or brings something into being. Material things are not efficient causes. They act only as moved by spiritual causes.
Read 60.43-61.16
Comment: This is Augustine’s answer to Boethius’ problem, how to reconcile human free will with God’s foreknowledge.
Read 183.43-184.13
An act of will is not "necessary" in the sense that it happens whether we will it or not. (There may be a fallacy here: we do not in every case will to will. A will act happens if and only if we will, not if and only if we will it, i.e. will to will.)
Read 184.13-34
If we say that "necessarily" the will is free, this necessity is not incompatible with freedom.
Read 184.34-
This passage remains obscure
Read 185.3-33
Boethius’ problem again.
Sensation and reason
If material things are not efficient causes and do not initiate change (61.30-1, 62.5-7), how is it possible to explain sensation, in which changes in organs of the body seem to produce perceptions in the mind? Augustine’s answer is that changes in the bodily organs do not cause perceptions.
Read 74.25-75.30
Comment: In short, body does not act on soul, soul acts on body to form it and make it work appropriately. When our body is affected by other bodies the soul’s control over our body becomes easier or more difficult, and the soul perceives the easiness or difficulty of its own controlling activity; this is sensation.
Read 69.40-70.38
Comments:
The topic is: degrees of excellence among things.
Compare 70.4-11 with pp. 34-5.
Read 70.39-71.45
Comment: This passages distinguishes the senses, the "proper sensibles" (i.e. the objects of sensation "proper" or peculiar to a given sense, such as colour, sensed only by sight), "common sensibles" (shape, perceived by both sight and touch), and the interior sense (which correlates the different kinds of sensation relating to the one thing). None of these is reason, which is a superior power which distinguishes and defines and discusses these senses and sensibles.
Read 72.1-73.32
Comments:
The point of this passage is to establish the superiority of reason.
72.31, 35, to see seeing: That is, to perceive that you see. This perceiving is not done by the eyes but by the mind, by the interior sense or by reason.
Read 73.34-74.19
Comment: Interior sense again, and also pursuing and fleeing. Later medieval writers attributed to animals and human beings an "aestimative power", an instinctive power to judge the usefulness or harmfulness of things sensed.
ORDER AND PEACE
Looking back: Augustine, like the neo-Platonists generally, distinguishes many levels of being arranged in a scale of excellence – the three levels of bodies, created spirits and God, and within the two lower levels various sub-levels. Arrangement in a scale of excellence is the idea of "order". "Peace... is the tranquillity of order", "order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place" (216.45-217.2). There are many orderings and sub-orderings, and there are therefore many kinds or levels of peace, and (for beings capable of happiness) many different kinds or levels of happiness.
Read para. 213.14-
Even in war (213.17-30), sedition, i.e. civil war (213.30-33), robbery (213.34-36) and individual tyranny both political and domestic, the aim is some kind of peace.
Read para. 214.16-
Even the solitary monster or wild animals or wicked men desire some kind of peace.
Read para. 215.32-
Comments:
Even what is perverted or upside down must be part of some order, for otherwise it would have no existence – just as some kind of unity is necessary for being, so is membership of the order of the universe.
215.44-5 spirit labours for the body’s preservation, hence the suffering: cf. 74.5-
215.45-216.30 Even death and decay exhibit order.
Read para. 216.32-
A summary. Even the miserable or damned (217.2-) belong to the order of the universe.
Read para. 217.25-
"There cannot be a nature in which there is no good" (217.26)
THERE IS NO ABSOLUTE EVIL
Read para. 49.9-
"Those who... bring in another nature... which God did not make" as an explanation of the existence of evil are the Manichees, who held that good is due to God and evil to another independent principle, which will be absolutely evil, just as God is absolutely good. The following passage is Augustine’s answer to them.
Read para. 49.19
Goodness is a matter of measure, form, order.
Read 49.42-56.25
Evil can have no existence except in a good nature. If all the thing’s goodness is destroyed the thing is destroyed.
Read 65.9-66.26, 100.18-102.2.
TIME
Read 108.29-110.8
According to Aristotle, the physical world was not created and it existed eternally and always will exist. An Aristotelian objection to the Christian doctrine that the world was created at a particular time is that God presumably acts rationally and there is no reason why the world should begin at one time rather than at another. Augustine answers that there is also no reason why the physical world should occupy some part of space rather than another, yet the Aristotelians held that the physical world was spatially finite. The Aristotelian reply to this is that the question "Why here and not elsewhere?" cannot arise, because there is no elsewhere – there is no empty space beyond the finite extent of the physical world. Similarly, Augustine says, there was no empty time before the world began. Time began when the world began, a finite time ago, just as space ends where the world ends, a finite distance away.
Read 228.40-242.15
Notice the role Augustine ascribes to memory in the measurement of time (p. 239).
MEMORY
Read pp. 78-93.
GRACE
Christians believe that God helps human beings to escape from sin and live well and attain eternal salvation. Does God help those who deserve to be helped, or does he help the undeserving? According to Augustine it is impossible for any human being to deserve such help; God does not owe help to anyone as a debt of justice. His help is "gratuitous", undeserved. Hence it is called "grace". Augustine worked out this doctrine in controversy with Pelagius.
Read para. 181.23
Comments
181.24, 25 According to Augustine, all of Adam’s descendants deserve to be punished for Adam’s sin ("original sin"), even apart from any sins they may commit themselves. However, God forgives part of the human race.
181.30 Man destroyed the freedom of his will by the evil use of free will. "Man" here means Adam, and the evil use that destroyed freedom was the first sin. As a result of the damage to human nature done by sin Adam and his descendants find it easy to choose evil, difficult to choose good in the face of temptation to evil.
Read para. 182.13
Comment: Before receiving grace one must have faith. Some said that the act of faith that precedes grace is the person’s own independent act. According to Augustine, even faith is a gift of God. The good works which follow faith are also gifts of God.
Read para. 182.33
Philippians chapter 2 verse 13 favours Augustine’s doctrine. God’s grace causes both the good will and the good deed. When someone chooses to do right and does it, God brings about both the choice and the action. No one can live a good life, or even wish to do so, unless moved by God’s grace.
183.1 the "preparation of the heart", i.e. the various thoughts and feelings that lead up to good choice.
183.1-8 This is an alternative theory that Augustine rejects, namely the theory that God and the human individual both together produce the good choice and the good act. In Augustine’s view God alone is the source of good. He does not mean that the human being makes no choice, but that the human choice is an effect of God’s grace. Cf. 61.35-62.1. God does not cause evil choices – the evil inclinations we have as sons of Adam are enough to explain evil choice. But when we will something good, it is because God has moved our will to make the good choice.
183.20- restates Augustine’s own view.
No one lives well without God’s grace, and anyone who receives grace does live well (since being willing to live rightly is what grace effects). It follows that when God decides who will receive his grace that determines who will live well and be saved. This is "predestination". God gives grace to some for a while but not in the end, and they live well while they have grace but fall away in the end and are not saved. The saving grace is the grace of "final perseverance", i.e. of living well at the end of one’s life. The predestined are those to whom God has decided, not for any merits of theirs (past or foreseen) to give the grace of final perseverance.
The best comprehensive statement of Augustine’s doctrine of grace is probably his De correptione et gratia. There are several translations, including On Rebuke and Grace in vol. 5 of A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. P. Schaff.
THE TWO CITIES
The City of God is the community of all the predestined, the Earthly City is the rest of the human race. Read 200.31-201.43
Despite their differences, the members of these two cities cooperate to some extent. Read 203.17-205.7.
Re-read 212.19-218.32
The point of this passage is that there are various levels of peace, and for rational beings various levels of happiness, and even the lower levels have some value (even the lowest levels of reality are good). This explains why the members of the City of God cooperate with others in maintaining earthly peace.
Read para. 211.27-
Although it cannot achieve true justice, the Earthly City does count as a "republic" and its citizens count as a "people".
You have now read extracts from most of the sections of the book. Go back to the beginning and read more extensively, including the editor’s introductions.
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