Saint Augustine: Truth, Knowledge, and Divine Illumination

Truth in Saint Augustine

Saint Augustine overcame skepticism. He argued that even if humans are prone to error, this does not imply the absolute negation of truth. His argument analyzes human error. The error reveals a primary truth: if I am mistaken, I exist.

Knowledge of the Truth

Saint Augustine's path to the knowledge of truth involves:

• Rejection of the senses: Sensory experiences cannot reveal truth because they are contingent, not absolute.
• Internalization: Only through the internalization of the soul can one know absolute truth and wisdom.
• Epistemological Significance: The soul contains objects of a higher nature. Therefore, the soul must seek the light and the foundation of truth outside itself. Saint Augustine states, "If you find that your nature is changeable, transcend yourself." From the interior, one ascends to the superior, which is God. Truth is God.
• Nature of Truth: Truth is something other than empirical. It is a principle of thinking by which the mind grasps the intelligibility of objects. Such objects are ideas (logic, truth, mathematics, numbers, and ethics, such as goodness) – the real objects of science. Their properties are those of immutability. What is immutable remains unchanged; it is permanent, as it cannot cease to be. It is eternal. Only God is eternal; time is not eternal, it is mobile. Therefore, only the immutable rules mobility; it is eternal. These ideas can only exist in God as models of creatures.

To access true knowledge, the human soul must reach the highest level, not through abstraction, but through vision or intellectual intuition. Saint Augustine believes that the soul discovers truth within itself, finding eternal truths once illuminated by the divine mind. This is called the theory of divine illumination. Just as the eye needs the light of the Sun to see, reason requires divine light to perceive truth, the intelligible. For Saint Augustine, to know the truth, one does not have to travel to God, but God sends a kind of illumination to help one see intelligible objects.

Saint Augustine's Doctrine

If truth exists, and its basis is God, then God exists. This is the epistemological argument. All Augustinian proofs have the same structure: from the exterior to the interior, and from the interior to the superior. Only God *is*; others are simple compounds (matter and form). God is Being in its fullness, essence, eternal truth, the highest good, and ultimate knowledge.