attributive use of descriptions See THEORY OF. DESCRIPTION. Augustine, Saint, known as Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Christian philosopher and church father, one of the chief sources of Christian thought in the West; his importance for medieval and modern European philosophy is impossible to describe briefly or ever to circumscribe. Matters are made more difficult because Augustine wrote voluminously and dialectically as a Christian theologian, treating philosophical topics for the most part only as they were helpful to theology – or as corrected by it.
Augustine fashioned the narrative of the Confessions (397–400) out of the events of the first half of his life. He thus supplied later biographers with both a seductive selection of biographical detail and a compelling story of his successive conversions from adolescent sensuality, to the image-laden religion of the Manichaeans, to a version of Neoplatonism, and then to Christianity. The story is an unexcelled introduction to Augustine’s views of philosophy. It shows, for instance, that Augustine received very little formal education in philosophy. He was trained as a rhetorician, and the only philosophical work that he mentions among his early reading is Cicero’s (lost) Hortensius, an exercise in persuasion to the study of philosophy. Again, the narrative makes plain that Augustine finally rejected Manichaeanism because he came to see it as bad philosophy: a set of sophistical fantasies without rational coherence or explanatory force. More importantly, Augustine’s final conversion to Christianity was prepared by his reading in ‘certain books of the Platonists’ (Confessions 7.9.13). These Latin translations, which seem to have been anthologies or manuals of philosophic teaching, taught Augustine a form of Neoplatonism that enabled him to conceive of a cosmic hierarchy descending from an immaterial, eternal, and intelligible God. On Augustine’s judgment, philosophy could do no more than that; it could not give him the power to order his own life so as to live happily and in a stable relation with the now-discovered God. Yet in his first years as a Christian, Augustine took time to write a number of works in philosophical genres. Best known among them are a refutation of Academic Skepticism (Contra academicos, 386), a theodicy (De ordine, 386), and a dialogue on the place of human choice within the providentially ordered hierarchy created by God (De libero arbitrio, 388/391–95). Within the decade of his conversion, Augustine was drafted into the priesthood (391) and then consecrated bishop (395). The thirty-five years of his life after that consecration were consumed by labors on behalf of the church in northern Africa and through the Latin-speaking portions of the increasingly fragmented empire. Most of Augustine’s episcopal writing was polemical both in origin and in form; he composed against authors or movements he judged heretical, especially the Donatists and Pelagians. But Augustine’s sense of his authorship also led him to write works of fundamental theology conceived on a grand scale. The most famous of these works, beyond the Confessions, are On the Trinity (399–412, 420), On Genesis according to the Letter (401–15), and On the City of God (413–26). On the Trinity elaborates in subtle detail the distinguishable ‘traces’ of Father, Son, and Spirit in the created world and particularly in the human soul’s triad of memory, intellect, and will. The commentary on Genesis 1–3, which is meant to be much more than a ‘literal’ commentary in the modern sense, treats many topics in philosophical psychology and anthropology. It also teaches such cosmological doctrines as the ‘seed-reasons’ (rationes seminales) by which creatures are given intelligible form. The City of God begins with a critique of the bankruptcy of pagan civic religion and its attendant philosophies, but it ends with the depiction of human history as a combat between forces of self-love, conceived as a diabolic city of earth, and the graced love of God, which founds that heavenly city within which alone peace is possible.
A number of other, discrete doctrines have been attached to Augustine, usually without the dialectical nuances he would have considered indispensable. One such doctrine concerns divine ‘illumination’ of the human intellect, i.e., some active intervention by God in ordinary processes of human understanding. Another doctrine typically attributed to Augustine is the inability of the human will to do morally good actions without grace. A more authentically Augustinian teaching is that introspection or inwardness is the way of discovering the created hierarchies by which to ascend to God. Another authentic teaching would be that time, which is a distension of the divine ‘now,’ serves as the medium or narrative structure for the creation’s return to God. But no list of doctrines or positions, however authentic or inauthentic, can serve as a faithful representation of Augustine’s thought, which gives itself only through the carefully wrought rhetorical forms of his texts.
See also NEOPLATONISM, PATRISTIC AU- THORS , PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGIO. M.D.J.