Introduction
St Augustine who lived between 354-430AD is one of the greatest figures in the history of modern western Christianity. He was born in North Africa (modern day Algeria) to divergent parents; his mother was a stout Christian while his father was a pagan. His mother saw to it that he grew up as a Christian; he later abandoned Christianity citing the illogical teachings and the many contradictions in the bible. He ended with bad company and found himself indulging in promiscuity. He studied “rhetoric”, and later travelled to Italy where he got interested and studied classical philosophers. This later facilitated his rational approach to Christianity through neoPlatonism (the philosophy or teachings of Plato, especially the theory that both physical objects and instances of qualities are recognizable because of their common relationship to an abstract form or idea). He was fascinated with the biblical teachings that had a moral dimension and eventually he returned to Christianity and agreed to be baptized (Rist 128)
St Augustine later put forward an argument that became fundamental to theology and tried to explain the interaction between religion and Science. The issue of religion and science has been a subject of much discussion in the past and more so presently. In trying to understand this matter, we need to examine the works of one of the greatest contributors. Famed for his philosophical approach to Christianity, Augustine remains the most significant figure for not only making sense out of the scriptures but also applying in the context of human life that saw him stray into the field of science. This paper will therefore examine and describe St Augustine’s views on both religion and science.
St Augustine’s views on Religion
Prior to his journey to Milan Augustine was a champion of the Manichean belief that the human soul was a light particle trapped in darkness. St Augustine’s view on religion was henceforth shaped by the decisive influence of the books of the Platonists he studied while with Ambrose in Milan. Although it’s not clear which exact books he read the fact remains that thej books triggered him to view Christianity differently and eventually make sense out of the churches’ spiritual tradition. They enabled him to change his earlier thinking which was dominated by common sense materialism to realization that it was possible for a non-physical substance to exist. These books provided him with a metaphysical outline of immense depth upon which the human condition could be plotted. The books that he encountered ontology (nature of being) showed him that there is a conspicuous difference between the spiritual and physical world. This divide was supposedly part of a larger unified entity and for Augustine God was regarded as the apex and therefore responsible for all that is below (Chadwick 16). His early works focused on the dissimilarity between the physical and spiritual world, making it clear to his readers that the spiritual world holds what we seek out in the physical world. According to him, the physical world was specific to an individual while the spiritual was common to everyone and whereas the physical world was temporary, the spiritual was eternal. Thus, the spirit’s eternity safeguards us against the hurting effects of losing the things that we love. Seemingly, he is suggesting that the spirit is the one that drives us to seek unity in the form of friendship and love and this can never be achieved by relying heavily on the physical world. The spiritual world with God as it basis promises everlasting freedom from anxiety caused y the temporal nature of the physical world (Mayer 43).
Despite the dual existence, the overall picture indicates the possibility of the evil problem. The physical world is not evil nor is it in the form that should be considered as obviously bad. This problem is brought about by the tendency of humans to over-rely on the physical world not knowing that the physical world is a small portion of reality (Chadwick 24). This according to Augustine is caused by the influence of the “original sin”. Therefore, we have a tendency to look at the physical world as an end in itself within which all moral concerns can be settled. Our failure to perceive the larger unity within which the physical world is part leads us to regard the physical world as a sphere of moral danger. However, given the rational character of the human soul and the Neo-platonic ontology there is reason to be optimistic. The human soul has the ability to perceive its limitation as being trapped in the physical world while connected to the spiritual world. Therefore there is a chance for redirecting one’s morality in the physical world, appreciating its beauty, but looking at it as a tool l for focusing one’s attention to what is placed above it. This ontology is faint on the questions that may rise concerning natural and moral evil. Natural evil is attributed to our way of looking at things with bias, tendency to look at things from a materialistic view and self-interest. From the larger unity, we can understand that natural evil is not evil at all and moral evil is a result of human conduct. Augustine goes on to say that, the moral evil is not anything but a result of one rejecting God and focusing his attention on the little things in life as if they were big (Chadwick 26.) He further emphasizes that the individualistic nature of evil as being a result of one’s pursuit of inferior things for a bad cause rather than good cause (Dodaro 17). As interpreted by Rist 106-8 the point behind this notion is very clear: Augustine is using Neo-Platonism to account for this phenomena we call evil by stressing human responsibility, therefore rejecting the perception that evil is an inherent entity or a creation of God. Augustine stresses the fundamental distinction between the creator and creature.
Augustine uses the Neo-Platonism ontology to account for evil without referring to it as God’s creation and more so describing it as an occurrence resulting from Human conduct. For him, a human being is composed of body and soul but the two are not in equal proportion, as spiritual unit, the soul is higher than the body, and therefore it is its obligation to rule the body.( Fitzgerald 22). From his early work, Augustine is uncertain about the Soul’s origin but this uncertainty decreases in his the later works. Augustine is adamant that the soul is identified as material of God, the body or any other material entity (Chadwick 143). Thus, he depicts the soul as being immaterial and a creation, he emphasizes on the either variation of the human soul, an element that distinguishes it from God and explains the occurrence of moral change, for good or worse (Chadwick 166). In the circa 395 C.E Augustine shows us that the Human soul and not God is responsible for the occurrence of moral evil in the world. However, later in the Circa 412 he points out that he is not in a position to judge the two competing hypotheses rather to show that none of them is inconsistent with Manichean and Neo-Platonism concept of moral evil. However, as O’Daly and writes, the four hypotheses Augustine puts forward are important in explaining to us how he understands the concept of moral evil (O’Daly 15). The four hypotheses are grouped into two, one group does require that the soul exists prior to incorporation into the body. The first hypothesis of this group says that God sends the soul to manage the body (sent hypothesis), the second says that the soul comes to dwell in the body by its own choice (voluntary hypothesis). Augustine treats the latter hypothesis as both indicating sin on the soul’s part and recurrent processes where the soul is subject to many embodiments (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, par. 6) The second group of hypotheses consists of the “traducianist” and the “creationist” hypotheses which do not indicate pre- existence of the soul prior to embodiment. The traducianist account says that all souls are a proliferation from Adam’s soul in a manner that is similar to that of the body; therefore, each soul is linked to the previous ones. On the other hand, the creationist hypothesis asserts that God creates a soul for every new body, thus creating a kind of vertical link between God and every soul. According to O’Connell and O’daly, these hypotheses do not end the logical possibilities; although they were the main contenders during Augustine’s time and it has never been clear which of the hypothesis that required pre-existence did Augustine incline? (O’Donnell 34). However, some passages in the confessions and other works seem to indicate that he strongly favored the Voluntary embodiment of the soul because it attributes sin to the human soul and also expresses the concept recurrence of the soul. By the time he wrote his letter 166 to Jerome in 415, there had been significant progress in his thinking on this issue. Whereas he does not give a clearly difference between the two hypotheses that support pre existence of the soul, he is clearly bothered by the recurrence for it raises a possibility of moral background before embodiment and even after death. By the time he comes to write book 10 of on the literal meaning of genesis he has a clear objection to the notion of Pre-embodiment sin: this likelihood, he writes, is ruled out by Romans 9:11 where it is written that the souls of the unborn have neither done good nor evil (Portalie 10). However, it is not clear whether this poses a significant objection to pre-existence. According to O’Connell, a discussion in on the literal meaning of genesis 10 a form of the sent hypothesis appears as a major contender, but is suddenly abandoned without explanation, creating speculation on what may have prompted the omission. Later, what Augustine writes in the happy life, circa 419/20 C.E seems to indicate that there are only two contending hypotheses about the soul’s origin, the traducianist and the creationist. Things get complicated when Augustine in the letter 166 out rightly criticizes the traducianist hypothesis, be hardly of offers an alternative. Letter 166 and De Genesi ad Litteram establishes the concern about the acquisition of original sin, an issue that becomes more pressing if one considers the fate of the infant who dies before baptism. The issue surrounding grace and moral autonomy was first encountered in the pelagian controversy, and Augustine is insisting on the importance of infant baptism as the situation is faced by what he refers to as the pelagian challenges (Mayer 72). In such a circumstance, the case of an infant who dies before baptism proves to be a major challenge to the creationist hypothesis that provides no answers to it. By stating that the soul is a product of God’s creation the pelagians are at loss to explain the conviction of the infant that is not baptized, especially after considering the earlier assertion the unborn have done neither good nor evil. According to Teselle, the pelagians champion the creationist theory because it seems to support their view that moral obligations of Christian life are depended on an individual (Teselle 67).
Elsewhere in Augustine’s work, there is an unendorsed fifth hypothesis. In one of his works Augustine suggest that God made only one soul, for Adam, and subsequent Human souls are not only scions of this soul but are identical to it before embodiment (Fitzgerald 13). This hypothesis manages to explain the theologically accepted notion of the original sin as being inherited by the soul rather than the body, and thus contrasts with the creationist hypothesis (O’ Connell 11).
Among his other contributions to the religion is the doctrine of the church that he developed, the visible and the invisible church. The former being a structure for preaching and administration of sacraments, while the former being a body of true invisible believers who are only known God. Augustine also tried to create a distinction between the regularity and validity of sacraments, emphasizing that the regular sacraments are performed by the catholic clergy while those performed by other denominations are considered irregular (Bishop of Hippo, 1990).
St Augustine’s views on Science
St Augustine made immense contribution to science through his intellectualism based on the Greek philosophical tradition, hi psychology focuses on the unequal and dominant authority that reason is deemed to exert over other abilities. Augustine inherits the ancient Greek confidence in the authority of rational over irrational. Augustine puts forward a hierarchy of things that simply exist, things that exist and reside, and things that exist reside and have an understanding (Fitzgerald 5). Whereas in some of his woks Augustine allows plants to posses souls, in the above context he is only interested in the souls that are capable of understanding and therefore he is not concerned about the basic structure of nature. He is concerned with showing how the soul may find happiness by freeing itself from its natural state. Thus, Augustine’s psychology tends to focus on cognitive abilities sense, perception and reasoning. According to him the criteria that governs the capacity depends on the outward manifestation and the object of cognitive ability, (Fitzgerald 9) and corresponding to this is the extent of its privacy and immateriality. Relying upon the criteria of privacy, Augustine starts by noting that even in the senses there exists a hierarchy from lower forms to higher forms. To him, Vision and hearing seems to be more in the public arena than smelling and testing, where in the later two the object must be ingested into one’s body in order to perceive the smell or test. While seeing and hearing are two processes that can occur concurrently. The sense of touch is placed between the two extremities. He elaborates that two people cannot touch same part of an object at the same time, and the most public of the senses, hearing and seeing are always in perspective. For example, one’s ability to see and hear from an object places a limitation on how others can have the same experience with the same object at the same time. He concludes by saying that, the sense experience in addition to relating to objects that are physical, alterable and therefore unreliable is hardly private.
The senses discussed above are coordinated by what Augustine calls “inner sense” (Fitzgerald 3) a line of thinking that bears resemblance to Aristotle’s “common sense”. For Augustine, the inner sense alerts us when a message is coming to us from an external source through various senses. The inner sense also informs us when one of the senses is not working properly. Thus, the inner sense receives, interprets and gives judgment on information from the other senses. It is therefore said to be central to these other senses (Fitzgerald 5) at this point however we are still at the same level with animals, it is only that when we move higher and embrace reasoning that we distinguish man from other creatures. Influenced by the Greek philosophical tradition, Augustine looks at reasoning seriously, centering on the minds ability to employ deductive reasoning, where rational need is the criteria of sufficiency. This point is important as it explain the perception that reason is distinctively human and the tendency to attach much importance to this fact. Reasoning should not be placed among the other senses as it has nothing in common with them but rather, a means whose agency the human soul accesses the truths that are not available to other senses. For Augustine reason is at the highest point of the human soul, not only by its ability to separate us from other creatures but most importantly, the way it separates us from them( Fitzgerald II). From this, we understand that reason is not entirely logical or psychological. The influence of the Greek tradition on Augustine made him look at truths of reason from an ontological point of view an isomorphism between the necessity that governs our thinking and the necessity that governs the structure of that about which we are thinking) this leads us to Augustine’s epistemology (the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, in particular its foundations, scope, and validity). Even if we assume a kind of similarity between the realities of reason and nature of being there is a lasting controversy regarding what nature reason reveals and how the realities of reason relate to other cognitive abilities such as insight and imagination. From the year 384, onwards Augustine accepted a Neo-Platonic explanation of the ontological and moral state in which we are. In addition the psychology escalated in on free will II in which it is reflected in rising hierarchy of capabilities (perception by senses, inner sense, and reason), providing a psychological alternative to the ontological classification. Augustine’s epistemology reflects Neo-platonic tendencies and is obviously conditioned by his own religious and philosophical concerns. Another feature of Augustine’s epistemology is his readiness to accept that a bigger proportion of our beliefs relating to the world are confined to trust and authority. As he says in on the teacher, we cannot aspire to verify all our historical beliefs when many beliefs about the present depend on trust (Fitzgerald 37). Here, as well as his other works he emphasizes the role of belief that surpasses that of understanding. Emphasizing that, we should not only believe that which we cannot understand but also use belief to guide our understanding. In on the teacher 11.37 Augustine asserts that language is a kind of third sphere, not belonging to the mind or the world, rather an instrument used by the mind to communicate about the world outside (Chadwick 4)
Conclusion
From the above account it is evident that Augustine was one of the most important historical features who did significant work across many disciplines. He developed his own approach to philosophy and theology which was shaped by his experience of life; beginning with Manichaeism followed by Platonism and Neoplatonism. On religion, he did extensive work on the concept of original sin; materialism and spiritualism; theories on the origin of the human soul he later contributed to the distinction of the church where he differentiates between the visible and the invisible church. Basically, he interpreted the bible by applying its teachings to human experience.
In science, Augustine did extensive work on the senses, classifying them in different categories based on perception and establishing that there was an inner sense, which interprets, and judges what comes in from the other senses. He contributed so much to our understanding of reason and how it interacts with the soul culminating into epistemology.
Works Cited
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Fitzgerald, Andrea., gen. ed. Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999.
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