Saint Augustine's Philosophy: Bridging Faith and Reason

Christianity and Philosophy: An Interplay

While some early Christian thinkers showed hostility toward philosophy, considering it an enemy of the faith, others saw philosophy and reason as valuable instruments to defend their religious beliefs.

No less challenging was reconciling the Christian notion of truth with Greek philosophy. For Christians, the divine origin of truth made their truth the truth, pure and simple.

Despite these difficulties, Christian thinkers found significant overlap with Platonism, which encouraged them to draw on this philosophical current to justify, defend, or understand their faith.

Furthermore, regarding humanity, the affirmation of its dualistic composition (soul and body) and the immortality of the soul were considered strong support for the defense of Christian beliefs.

Augustine's Philosophical Synthesis: Reason and Faith

Saint Augustine began developing his philosophical synthesis as part of a broader adaptation of philosophy to Christianity by Christian thinkers of the third century. In his work, there is no clear distinction between reason and faith; this unity marks the discourse of all his thinking. There is only one truth, as revealed by religion, and reason can help to know it better. His famous dictum, "Believe to understand," encapsulates this approach.

Human Nature and the Soul

• Human Being: Body and Soul

  The human being is a composite of body (matter) and soul (form). In the strictest Platonic tradition, the most important reality is the soul, conceiving the body as a mere instrument of the soul.

• The Soul's Immortality

  The soul is immortal, but unlike in Platonism, it is not eternal. The arguments to defend its immortality largely derive from Platonism.

• The Transmission of the Soul

  Another theory posits that the soul is transmitted from parents to children, generated by parents just as the body is, which could explain the transmission of original sin.

Augustine's Conception of God

A central theme for Saint Augustine is the subject of God. His philosophy is predominantly a theology, since God is not only the truth that seeks knowledge, but also the ultimate goal towards which humanity strives.

• Arguments for God's Existence

  Saint Augustine is not concerned, however, with developing systematic evidence for the existence of God. Instead, he proposes various arguments that reveal His existence.

• God Within Humanity

  We also find God within humanity, where Saint Augustine often directed us to find truth within ourselves.

• Divine Creation and Seminal Reasons

  Creation is the result of a free act by God. However, the essences of all created things were in the mind of God as exemplars or models of things, both those established at the original time and those who would appear later.

  In the act of creation, God therefore creates beings in act and others in potency, such as seminal rationes, so that all natural beings were created from the beginning of the world.