Kenny Anthony. Medieval Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 2
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The earliest portrait of St Augustine, from the Papal Library in the Lateran, c. 600.
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PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
Reason promises to make God appear as clearly to his mind as the sun
does to his eyes. For this purpose the eyes of the soul must be cleansed of all
desire for mortal things. Augustine in the dialogue renounces the pursuit
of riches, honour, and sexual pleasure (this last renunciation vividly
described). Reason does not yet keep the promise to display God, but it
does oVer Augustine a proof of the immortality of his soul. Consider the
notion of truth. True things may pass away, but truth itself is everlasting.
Even if the world ceased to exist, it would still be true that the world has
ceased to exist. But truth has its home in the soul, so the soul, like truth,
must be immortal (S 1. 15. 28, 2. 15. 28).
After his baptism Augustine remained in Italy for a year and a half. In
this period he wrote a further brief tract on the immortality of the soul,
and a more substantial work, On the Freedom of the Will, which we encoun-
tered in the Wrst volume of this history. In 388 he returned to Africa and for
the next few years lived the life of a private gentleman in his home town of
Tagaste. In 391 he found his Wnal vocation and was ordained priest,
becoming soon after bishop of Hippo in Algeria, where he resided until
his death in 430.
The great majority of his works were written during this Wnal period of
his life. He was a copious writer, and has left behind some 5 million words.
Much of his output consists of sermons, Bible commentaries, and contro-
versial tracts about theology or Church discipline. He no longer wrote
philosophical pieces comparable to those of the years of his conversion. But
a number of his major works contain material of high philosophical
interest.
In 397 Augustine wrote a work entitled Confessions: a prayerful dialogue
with God tracing the course of his life from childhood to conversion. It is
not an autobiography of the normal kind, though it is the foundation
specimen of the genre. Besides being the main source of our knowledge of
Augustine’s pre-episcopal life, it contains many incidental philosophical
reXections and concludes with a full-Xedged monograph on the nature of
time.1 Its enchanting style has always made it the most popular of August-
ine’s works.
Between 400 and 417 Augustine worked on another ma sterpiece, Wfteen
books entitled On the Trinity. The earlier books of the treatise are largely
1 See Ch. 5 below.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
3
concerned with the analysis of biblical and ecclesiastical texts concerning
the mystery of three persons in one God. Philosophers Wnd matter of much
greater interest in the subtle portrayal of human psychology employed in
the later books in the course of a search for an analogy of the heavenly
Trinity in the hearts and minds of men and women.2
Augustine on History
The most massive and most laboriou s of Augustine’s works was The City of
God, on which he worked from 413 to 426. Written at a time when the
Roman Empire was under threat from successive barbarian invasions, it
was the Wrst great synthesis of classical and Christian thought . This is
implicit in the very title of the work. The Christian gospels have much to
say about the Kingdom of God; but for Greece and Rome the paradigm
political institut ion was not the kingdom but the city. Even emperors liked
to think of themselves as the Wrst citizens of a city; and the philosophical
emperor Marcus Aurelius thought the city we should love above all was
the city of Zeus. The City of God sets Jesus, the cruciWed King of the Jews, at
the apex of the idealized city-state of pagan philosophy.
Like Aristotle in his Metaphysics. Augustine surveys the history of phil-
osophy from the distant days of Thales, showing how earlier philosophers
approximated to, but fell short of, the truth that he now presents. But
whereas Aristotle was mainly interested in the physical theories of his
predecessors, Augustine is concerned above all with their philosophical
theology—their ‘natural’ theology, as he called it, giving currency to an
expression with a long history ahead of it (DCD VIII. 1–9). Throughout the
work Augustine sets Christian teaching side by side with the best of ancient
philosophy, and especially with the writing of his favourites, the Neopla-
tonists, whom he regarded as almost-Christians (DCD VIII. 8–9). An
engaging instance is the following:
Plotinus uses the beauty of Xowers and leaves to show that the providence of
God—whose beauty is beyond words and visible only to the mind—extends even
to lowly and earthly things. These castaways, he argues, doomed to swift decay,
could not display such delicate patterns if they did not draw their shapes from a
2 See Ch. 7 below.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
4
realm in which a mental and unchangeable form holds them all together in a
unity. And this is what the Lord Jesus tells us when he says ‘Consider the lilies of
the Weld, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you
that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if
God so clothe the grass of the Weld, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the
oven, shall he not much more clothe you, o ye of little faith?’ (DCD X. 14; cf.
Plotinus, Enneads 3. 2. 13; Matt. 6: 28–9).
But while Augustine is prepared to read Platonism into the Sermon on
the Mount, he has little sympathy with attempts to give philosophical and
allegorical interpretations of traditional Roman religion. The original
impetus for the composition of The City of God—which took thirteen
years to complete—came from the sack of Rome by Gothic invaders.
Pagans blamed this disaster on the Christians’ abolition of the worship of
the city’s gods, who had therefore abandoned it in its hour of need.
Augustine devoted the Wrst book s of his treatise to showing that the gods
of classical Rome were vicious and impotent and that their worship was
disgusting and depraving.
The Romans had long identi W ed their senior gods—Jupiter, Juno,
Venus, and the like—with the characters of the Homeric pantheon, such
as Zeus, Hera, and Aphrodite. Augustine follows Plato and Cicero in
denouncing as blasphemous the myths that represent such deities as
engaged in arbitrary, cruel, and indecent behaviour. He mocks too at the
proliferation of lesser gods in popular Roman superstition: is heaven so
bureaucratized, he asks, so that while to look after a house a single human
porter suYces, we need no less than three gods: Forculus to guard the
doors, Cardea for the hinges, and Limentinus for the threshold? (DCD IV.
18). The identiWcation and individuation of these minor divinities rais e a
number of philosophical problems, which Augustine illustrates. More
often he uses against late Roman paganism the weapon of erudite sarcasm
that Gibbon, thirteen centuries later, was to deploy so teasingly against
historic Christianity.
A brief, eloquent, survey of the history of the Roman Republic suYces
to show that the worship of the ancient Gods does not guarantee security
from disasters. The eventual unparalleled greatness of the Roman Empire,
Augustine says, was the reward given by the one true God to the virtues of
the best among the citizens. ‘They placed no value on their own wealth in
comparison with the commonwealth and the public purse; they shunned
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
5
avarice and gave freely of themselves to the fatherland; they were guilty of
no breach of law or licentious conduct. Thus by a sure way they strove
towards honour, power, and glory’ (DCD V. 15). The reward which they
sought has come to them: they were able to impose their law on many
nations and they are renowned in the annals of many people. But they
have no part in the heavenly city, for they did not worship the one true
God, and they aimed only at self-gloriWcation.
A large part of Augustine’s attack on Roman religion focuses on the
degrading nature of the public spectacles held in honour of the gods. No
doubt many a modern liberal would be no less disgusted than Augustine at
much of what went on in Roman theatres and amphitheatres. She would
probably be more shocked by the cruelty of Roman entertainment than by
its indecency; with Augustine it appears to have been the other way round.
Augustine does not regard the gods of pagan myth as complete W ctions.
On the contrary, he thinks that they are wicked spirits who take advantage
of human superstition to divert to themselves worship that is due only to
the one true God (DCD VII. 33). Several Platonists had spoken of a
threefold classiWcation of rational beings: gods, men, and daimones (demons).
Gods dwelt in heaven, men on earth, and demons in the air between.
Demons were like gods in being immortal, but like men in being subject to
passions. Many demons are bad, but some are good, such as the daimon who
was the familiar of Socrates.3 Good demons, these Platonists thought, could
be of service as intermediaries between men and gods (DCD VIII. 14, IX. 8,
X. 9).
Augustine does not reject the idea that the air is full of demons, but he
does not accept that any of them are good, still less that they can mediate
between God and man. In many ways they are inferior to human beings.
‘They are utterly malevolent spirits, totally indiVerent to justice, swollen
with pride, green with envy, cunning in deception. They do indeed live in
the air, suitably imprisoned there after having been cast down from the
heights of the upper heaven because of their irreparable crime’ (DCD VIII.
22). In other words, Augustine identiWes the Platonic daimones with the fallen
angels whom most English readers Wrst encounter in Milton’s Paradise Lost.It
was indeed Augustine who fastened onto the imagination of Christianity
the story that before creating human beings of Xesh and blood God created
3 See vol. i, p. 43.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
6
orders of wholly spiritual beings, some of whom took part in a pre-cosmic
rebellion that led to their eternal damnation.
Augustine admits that the Bible is uninformative about the e arly history
of angels. Genesis does not mention them in the seven days of creation, and
we have to turn to Psalms or Job to learn that angels are indeed God’s
creatures. If we are to Wt them into the Genesis story, we should conclude
that they were created on the Wrst day: on that day God created light and
the angels as the Wrst partakers of divine illumination (DCD XI. 9). On the
same day, the Bible tells us, God divided the light from the darkness: and
here Augustine sees divine foresight at work. ‘Only He could foresee, before
it happened, that some angels would fall and be deprived of the light of
truth and left for ever in the darkness of their pride’ (DCD XI. 19). ‘There
are two societies of angels, contrasted and opposed: one good by nature and
upright of will, one good by nature, but perverted of will. These are shown
by more explicit testimonies elsewhere but indicated here in Genesis by the
words ‘‘Light’’ and ‘‘Darkness’’ ’ (DCD XI. 34). These two cohorts of angels
are the origin of the two cities that are the ostensible theme of the entire
work, even though their history is not taken up in detail until the twelfth
book. There are good and bad angels, and good and bad humans: but we do
not have to think that there are four cities; men and angels can unite in the
same communities.
Between the creation of angels and the creation of humans, Augustine
tells us, came the creation of animals. All animals, whether solitary like
wolves or gregarious like deer, were created by God in multiple specimens
simultaneously. But the human race was created in a single individual,
Adam: from him came Eve, and from this Wrst pair came all other humans.
This unique creation did not imply that man was an unsocial animal; just
the contrary. ‘The point was to emphasize the unity of human society, and
to stress the bonds of human concord, if human beings were bound
together not merely by similarity of nature but also by the aVection of
kinship’ (DCD XII. 22). The human race, Augustine says, is, by nature,
more sociable than any other species. But—he goes on to add—it is also,
through ill will, more quarrelsome than any other (DCD XII. 28).
Human beings stand in the middle between angels and dumb animals:
they share intellect with angels, but they have bodies as the beasts do.
However, in the original divine plan they would have had a greater kinship
with the angels, because they would have been immortal. After a life of
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
7
obedience to God they would have passed into fellowship with the angels
without death intervening. It was because of Adam’s sin in Paradise that
humans became mortal, subject to the bodily death that had always been
natural for beasts. After the Fall death would be the common lot of all
humans; but after death some, by God’s grace, would be rewarded by
admission to the company of the good angels, while others would be
punished by damnation alongside the evil angels—a second death more
grievous than the Wrst (DCD XIII. 12, XIV. 1).
When Plato described the origin of the cosmos in the Timaeus,he
attributed the creation of humans not to the supreme being who fashioned
the world, but to lesser gods, creatures of his, who were his agents (Tim.
41c). Augustine does not deny the existence of such august divine servants:
he simply treats Plato’s word ‘gods’ as a misnomer for angels. But he is
resolutely opposed to the idea that such superior executives can be called
creators. Bringing things into existence out of nothing is a prerogative of
the one true God, and whatever service an angel may render to God in the
development of lesser creatures, he is no more a creator than is a gardener
or a farmer who produces a crop (DCD XII. 26).
The contrast between the biblical and the Platonic conception of the
human creature comes into sharp relief if we ask the question: Is death—
the separation of soul and body—a good thing or a bad thing? For Genesis,
death is an evil: it is a punishment for sin. In a world of innocence body and
soul would remain forever united (DCD XIII. 6). For many Platonists,
however, and for Plato himself in some of his writings, the soul is only
happy when stripped of the body and naked before God (DCD XIII. 16 and
19; cf. Phaedo 108c; Phaedr. 248c). Again, it is a common Platonic theme that
souls after death may be forced to return into bodies (other human bodies,
perhaps, or even animal bodies) as a punishment for sins in their previous
life. According to the prophets of the Old and New Testament, however,
the souls of the virtuous will in the end return to their own bodies, and
this reunion of body and soul will be a source of everlasting happiness
(DCD XIII. 17 and 22, XXII. 19).
Augustine does not deny—indeed he emphasizes—that bodily desires
and passions can impede spiritual progress; he quotes the book of Wisdom:
‘the corruptible body weighs down the soul’. But this is true only of the
body of fallen humans in their mortal life. The human body in Paradise had
no disturbing emotions and no unruly desires. Adam and Eve lived without
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
8
pain or fear, for they enjoyed perfect health and were never in physical
danger; their bodies were incapable of injury, and childbirth, but for the Fall,
would have been painless. They ate only what was necessary for the preser-
vation of their bodies, and their sexual organs were under the entire control
of cool reason, to be used only for procreation (DCD XIII. 23, XIV. 26). But
though they lived without passion, they were not without love. ‘The
couple, living in true and loyal partnership, shared an untroubled love
for God and for each other. This was a source of immense joy, since the
beloved one was always present for enjoyment’ (DCD XIV. 10).
Augustine’s Two Cities
Augustine traces the history of the human race from its origins in Adam
and Eve, Wtting it into the template of his master nar rative, the two cities.
‘Though there are many great nations throughout the world living under
diVerent systems of religion and ethics, and diversiWed by language, arms,
and dress, nonetheless it has come to pass that there are only two principal
divisions of human society, which scripture allows us to call two cities’
(DCD XIV. 1). One city lives according to the Xesh, another according to
the spirit; one is created by self-love, the other by the love of God; one
glories in itself, the other is given glory by God (DCD XIV. 280). One is
predestined to join the Devil in Wnal punishment which will destroy it as a
city; the other is predestined to reign with God for ever and ever (DCD XV.
1 and 4).
The division between the two cities begins with the children of the
primal pair. ‘Cain was the Wrst son born to the two parents of the human
race, and he belonged to the city of man; Abel, their younger son, belonged
to the city of God’ (DCD XV. 2). The enmity of the two cities is Wrst
expressed in Cain’s slaughter of Abel; and Cain’s fratricidal example was
followed by Romulus, the founder of Rome, who slew his brother Remus
(DCD XV. 5).
In the Wfteenth and sixteenth books of The City of God Augustine traces
the early history of the City of God, following the narrative of Genesis and
seeing the City as incarnate in the Hebrew Patriarchs, through Noah,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses. The seven teenth book seeks
illumination about the City of God from the writings of the prophets and
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
9
psalmists. The prophecies that exalt the kingdom of David and the Jewish
priesthood and promise them everlasting duration must have their true
fulWlment elsewhere since the institutions of Israel no longer exist (DCD
XVII. 7).
We return to secular history with the eighteenth book, which narrates
the rise and fall of a series of pagan empires: Assyria, Egypt, Argos, and
Rome. Augustine is anxious to reconcile biblical and secular chronologies,
assigning the Mosaic exodus to the time of the mythical king Cecrops of
Athens and placing the fall of Troy in the period of the judges in Israel. He
treats as simultaneous the foundation of Rome, the beginnings of philoso-
phy in Ionia, and the deportation of Israel. The destruction of the temple in
Jerusalem, he tells us, happened in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus in
Rome; the Babylonian captivity of the Jews ended at the same time as
the expulsion of the kings and the foundation of the Roman Republic. On e
of the purposes of his rather dizzying chronology is to emphasize that the
teaching of the Hebrew prophets antedated the researches of the Greek
philosophers (XVIII. 37).
In Augustine’s narrative Jerusalem becomes the emblem of the City of
God and Babylon becomes the emblem of the city of the world. Babylon
was the city of confusion, where God had shattered the original unity of
human language in order to frustrate the building of the tower of Babel
(Gen. 11: 1–9). In the city of the world philosophers speak with as many
diVerent tongues as the builders of Babel. Some say there is only one world;
some say there are many; some say this world is everlasting, others say that
it will perish. Some say it is controlled by a divine mind, others that it is the
plaything of chance. Some say the soul is immortal, others that it perishes
with the body. Some place the supreme good in the soul, others in the
body, others in external goods. Some say the senses are to be trusted, others
that they are to be treated with contempt. In the secular city there is no
authority to decide between these conXicting views: Babylon embraces all
alike, without discrimination and without adjudication (DCD XVIII. 42).
How diVerent in the City of God, where all accept the authority of
canonical Scripture!
The most important disputations among philosophers are those that
concern the ultimate good and the ultimate evil. The ultimate good is that
for which other things are desirable, while it is itself desirable for its own
sake. Philosophers have sought to place the ultimate good in the present
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
10
life: some hold that it is pleasure, some that it is virtue, some that it is
tranquillity, others that it is in the enjoyment of the basic goods with
which nature has endowed us. Many sects regard the ultimate good as
constituted by one or other combination of these. But the City of God
knows that eternal life is the supreme good, and eternal death the supreme
evil, and that it is only by faith and grace that the supreme good can be
achieved and the supreme evil avoided (DCD XIX. 1–4).
It is clear from Augustine’s description of the two cities that one cannot
simply identify Babylon with the pagan empire and Jerusalem with the
Christian empire. The city of God was already a community long before
the birth of Christ, and longer before the conversion of Constantine. The
Christian empire contains sinners as well as saints, as Augustine illustrates
with the example of the emperor Theodosius, whom St Ambrose forced to
do penance for the brutality with which he suppressed a rebellion at
Thessalonica in 391 (DCD V. 26). Nor is the City of God to be identiWed
with the Church on earth, even though in later ages Augustine’s book was
sometimes taken to be a guide to relations between Church and State. The
nature of the two cities is not fully understood until we consider their Wnal
state, which Augustine does in the last three books of The City of God.
Augustine combs the sayings of the prophets, the sermons of Jesus, the
epistles of the Apostles, and the book of Revelation, for information about
the future of the world. Between the resurrection of Jesus and the end of
history there is a period of a thousand years as described in the book of
Revelation (DCD XX. 1–6). During this period the saints are reigning with
Christ. Their thousand-year reign evolves in two stages: during their lives
on earth the saints are the dominant members of a Church that includes
sinners, and after their death they are still in some mysterious way in
communion with the Church that is the kingdom of God (DCD XX. 9).
Augustine is contemptuous of any interpretation of Revelation that looks
forward to a thousand-year orgy of wassail for the saints after the end of
history. Whether we interpret John’s millennium literally, or take the
number 1,000 as a symbol of perfection, we are already in the middle of
the saints’ reign (DCD XX. 7).
Augustine tells us that the Wnal drama, after the numbered years have
passed, will play itself out in seven acts. First the prophet Elijah will come
and convert the Jewish people to Christ (XX. 29). Secondly, Satan will be
unloosed and for three and a half years Antichrist will persecute the
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
11