Typical attitude of St. Augustine.
The seething of these potent and ambiguous elements can be studied nowhere better than in Saint Augustine. He is a more genial and complete representative of Christianity than any of the Greek Fathers, in whom the Hebraic and Roman vitality was comparatively absent. Philosophy was only one phase of Augustine’s genius; with him it was an instrument of zeal and a stepping-stone to salvation. Scarcely had it been born out of rhetoric when it was smothered in authority. Yet even in that precarious and episodic form it acquired a wonderful sweep, depth, and technical elaboration. He stands at the watershed of history, looking over either land; his invectives teach us almost as much of paganism and heresy as his exhortations do of Catholicism. To Greek subtlety he joins Hebrew fervour and monkish intolerance; he has a Latin amplitude and (it must be confessed) coarseness of feeling; but above all he is the illumined, enraptured, forgiven saint. In him theology, however speculative, remains a vehicle for living piety; and while he has, perhaps, done more than any other man to materialise Christianity, no one was ever more truly filled with its spirit.
He achieves Platonism.
Saint Augustine was a thorough Platonist, but to reach that position he had to pass in his youth through severe mental struggles. The difficult triumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained the conception of intelligible objects was won only after long discipline and much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed to him at first an object of sense: God, if he existed, must be perceptible, for to Saint Augustine’s mind also, at this early and sensuous stage of its development, esse was percipi. He might never have worked himself loose from these limitations, with which his vivid fancy and not too delicate eloquence might easily have been satisfied, had it not been for his preoccupation with theology. God must somehow be conceived; for no one in that age of religious need and of theological passion felt both more intensely than Saint Augustine. If sensible objects alone were real, God must be somewhere discoverable in space; he must either have a body like the human, or be the body of the universe, or some subtler body permeating and moving all the rest.
These conceptions all offered serious dialectical difficulties, and, what was more to the point, they did not satisfy the religious and idealistic instinct which the whole movement of Saint Augustine’s mind obeyed. So he pressed his inquiries farther. At length meditation, and more, perhaps, that experience of the flux and vanity of natural things on which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him that reality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong rather to the imperceptible and eternal. Only that which is never an object of sense or experience can be the root and principle of experience and sense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of a moving show. God could now be apprehended and believed in precisely because he was essentially invisible: had he anywhere appeared he could not be the principle of all appearance; had he had a body and a locus in the universe, he could not have been its spiritual creator. The ultimate objects of human knowledge were accordingly ideas, not things; principles reached by the intellect, not objects by any possibility offered to sense. The methodological concepts of science, by which we pass from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did not attract Augustine’s attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was a subordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by “certissima ratione vel experientia,” and he even wished science to be allowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mystic and allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoid the puerilities into which any literal interpretation—of the creation in six days, for instance—would be sure to run. Unbelievers would thus not be scandalised by mythical dogmas “concerning things which they might have actually experienced, or discovered by sure calculation.”
Science was to have its way in the field of calculable experience; that region could be the more readily surrendered by Augustine because his attention was henceforth held by those ideal objects which he had so laboriously come to conceive. These were concepts of the contemplative reason or imagination, which envisages natures and eternal essences behind the variations of experience, essences which at first receive names, becoming thus the centres of rational discourse, then acquire values, becoming guides to action and measures of achievement, and finally attract unconditional worship, being regarded as the first causes and ultimate goals of all existence and aspiration.
He identifies it with Christianity.
This purely Platonic philosophy, however, was not to stand alone. Like every phase of Saint Augustine’s speculation, it came, as we have said, to buttress or express some religious belief. But it is a proof of his depth and purity of soul that his searching philosophic intuition did more to spiritualise the dogmas he accepted from others than these dogmas could do to denaturalise his spontaneous philosophy. Platonic ideas had by that time long lost their moral and representative value, their Socratic significance. They had become ontological entities, whereas originally they had represented the rational functions of life. This hypostasis of the rational, by which the rational abdicates its meaning in the effort to acquire a metaphysical existence, had already been carried to its extreme by the Neo-Platonists. But Saint Augustine, while helpless as a philosopher to resist that speculative realism, was able as a Christian to infuse into those dead concepts some of the human blood which had originally quickened them. Metaphysics had turned all human interests into mythical beings, and now religion, without at all condemning or understanding that transformation, was going to adopt those mythical beings and turn them again into moral influences. In Saint Augustine’s mind, fed as it was by the Psalmist, the Platonic figments became the Christian God, the Christian Church, and the Christian soul, and thus acquired an even subtler moral fragrance than that which they had lost when they were uprooted by a visionary philosophy from the soil of Greek culture.
God the good.
Saint Augustine’s way of conceiving God is an excellent illustration of the power, inherent in his religious genius and sincerity, of giving life and validity to ideas which he was obliged to borrow in part from a fabulous tradition and in part from a petrified metaphysics. God, to him, was simply the ideal eternal object of human thought and love. All ideation on an intellectual plane was a vague perception of the divine essence. “The rational soul understands God, for it understands what exists always unchanged.” ... “God is happiness; and in him and from him and through him all things are happy which are happy at all. God is the good and the beautiful.” He was never tired of telling us that God is not true but the truth (i.e., the ideal object of thought in any sphere), not good but the good (i.e., the ideal object of will in all its rational manifestations). In other words, whenever a man, reflecting on his experience, conceived the better or the best, the perfect and the eternal, he conceived God, inadequately, of course, yet essentially, because God signified the comprehensive ideal of all the perfections which the human spirit could behold in itself or in its objects. Of this divine essence, accordingly, every interesting thing was a manifestation; all virtue and beauty were parcels of it, tokens of its superabundant grace. Hence the inexhaustible passion of Saint Augustine toward his God; hence the sweetness of that endless colloquy in prayer into which he was continually relapsing, a passion and a sweetness which no one will understand to whom God is primarily a natural power and only accidentally a moral ideal.