Aristotle's Ethics and Augustine's Philosophy of Faith

Aristotle: Happiness and Virtue

Ends are sought as means to higher ends, but if we seek an end in itself, that end must be the highest good. Aristotle asserts that this highest good is happiness.

The Goods and Intellectual Activity

Aristotle identifies three types of assets (goods):

• External goods
• Goods of the body
• Goods of the soul (the most important, goods par excellence)

Happiness consists in the exercise of man's highest activity, which is not vegetative or merely sensitive, but intellectual. Therefore, the supreme good of man, his happiness, lies in intellectual activity.

Understanding Arete (Virtue)

The word arete, translated as virtue, signifies a way of being or human excellence. Something is defined as virtuous because it fulfills its appropriate role. For man, arete makes us better in every way.

Aristotle defines arete as a selective way of being, maintaining a mean relative to us, determined by reason. This mean lies between two vices: one of excess and one of deficiency (default). Arete is a habit, something built into our very being.

Man as a Political Animal (Zoon Politikon)

The qualities discussed in Aristotle's ethics are fundamentally linked to politics, as politics is the most fundamental of all sciences, encompassing all others. Policy serves to construct the best possible life.

The Polis and Political Regimes

The city (*polis*) is the space where man deliberates and chooses. Being part of the human world requires that the impulses driving us be free.

Like Plato, Aristotle studied various political regimes. He highlighted aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny, suggesting that the best possible arrangement is a mixture that combines the best elements of each.

Key Ideas in Aristotle's State Organization

Aristotle’s state organization emphasizes three key ideas:

1. Harmony of the Citizens: Achieving consensus on what everyone agrees upon.
2. Autarky: A typically Aristotelian term, referring to the independence and self-sufficiency of the polis.
3. Education: The essential task of the State, aiming to create better citizens.

Saint Augustine: Priority of Faith Over Reason

For St. Augustine, philosophy can only be Christian. If philosophy is the quest for wisdom, and if God's intellectual Word is incarnate in Christ, then the territory of philosophy becomes identified with the Christian religion.

The Three Degrees of Knowledge

Augustine identifies three types of knowledge:

1. Sensitive Knowledge: The lowest degree, requiring the body to perform.
2. Rational Knowledge (of the sensible): Captures the true universality of sensible things.
3. Rational Knowledge (of the unchanging truths): Knowledge of eternal, unchanging truths.

Faith as the Starting Point of Philosophy

The starting point of philosophy must be faith and the Scriptures. Augustine famously articulated this relationship in the formula that became a program for the 13th century: credo ut intelligam (I believe in order to understand).

For Augustine, studying problems outside the Scriptures and a living relationship with God lacks theoretical sense or moral justification once a man has found God's truth revealed in Scripture.

The Two Cities and Human Inclinations

According to Augustine, man has two fundamental inclinations:

• Self-Esteem (or Self-Love): Leads to sin.
• Love of God: Leads to virtue.

For the Christian philosopher, the community of believers guided by the love of God is the City of God (*Civitas Dei*), which is perpetually pitted against the Earthly City (*Civitas Terrena*) of men who love themselves.

Justice and Divine Law

Since virtue and true wisdom come only from God, the earthly political order will be just only insofar as it aligns with the City of God. This adaptation, however, will never be perfect until the end of time.

Without the love of God—in other words, without justice—there is no real state.

At the top of all law is the Law of God, which is the divine reason that orders the universe. Consequently, the law of a State is fair only to the extent that it derives from the Law of God through natural law.

Augustine's political philosophy ultimately claimed the primacy of the spiritual power of the Church over political power on earth.