Augustinianism

The claim

The mind is illuminated by a light it does not generate. The will is bound by what it loves rather than by external force. And a person is a problem to himself before he is a knower of anything else.

What it held

Augustine's originality is easiest to see by comparison. For the Greeks, weakness of will was a puzzle: if you know the good you will do it, so wrongdoing must be ignorance. Augustine reports from inside that this is simply false. He knew what was better and did the other, and he wants to know how that is possible.

The answer is a self that is not unified. The will can want and not want the same thing, and can be in bondage not to anything outside it but to its own habits of loving. That is a psychological claim with enormous theological consequences: if the will is bound, then it cannot free itself, and grace has to come from outside.

The epistemology runs parallel. The mind does not manufacture truth; it sees by a light it did not make, which is divine illumination — Platonic recollection recast so that the source is God rather than a previous life. And time, in Confessions XI, turns out to exist only in the mind: past and future are memory and expectation, and the present has no duration.

How it argued

Introspection used as evidence, which is new, combined with scriptural exegesis and formal argument against a named opponent.

What it was arguing against

Manichaean dualism, the Donatists on the purity of the church, and Pelagius on whether human beings can choose the good without grace — the last of which shaped Western Christianity permanently.

Where it disagreed with itself

Predestination, endlessly. Whether illumination means God supplies the concepts or only the light to see them by, which divides Bonaventure from Aquinas.

Common misconceptions

That Augustine hated the body and sex as such. He argued against Manichaean contempt for matter and held that creation is good; his account of desire is about disorder rather than dirtiness. And original sin in his sense is a claim about inherited condition, not about individual guilt for another's act.

How it began

A rhetoric professor's conversion at thirty-two, described in a book that invents a genre. The philosophy is inseparable from the biography, which is itself an argument about what philosophy can be.

What became of it

The dominant Latin position until Aristotle arrived in the thirteenth century, then the Franciscan alternative to Thomism, then the engine of the Reformation.

Lasting influence

Luther and Calvin are Augustinians. So is Jansenism, and Pascal. Descartes' cogito has a close Augustinian precedent, which Arnauld pointed out to him. Wittgenstein opens the Investigations by quoting him.

Why it still matters

Every account of weakness of will, addiction and self-deception is working the ground he opened, and his description of a will divided against itself is still the best there is.

Put another way

A man who knows the way, wants to go, and finds he does not move.

Where to start

Confessions Books I–IX for the life, then Book XI for the philosophy. Skipping to XI works too.

The surprising bit

The Confessions were written when he was already a bishop, in his forties, and are addressed to God rather than to readers. Nobody had written a book like that before and it is arguable nobody has since.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Neoplatonism, Patristics

Opposed by

Thomism

Influenced

Early Scholasticism, Jansenism, Christian Mysticism

The verdict

The most personally revealing philosophy anyone has written, and the most consequential in the Latin West.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy