St. Augustine
Content
Reflection Paper Sem. Patrick James M. Jordan St. Augustine of Hippo St. Augustine was born at Tagaste in the African province of Numidia in 354 A.D. At the age of 16 he began the study of Rhetoric in Carthage, a port city given to licentious ways. Though his mother Monica had instilled in him the ways of Christian thought and behavior, he threw off his religious faith and morality, taking at this time a mistress by whom he had a son and whom he lived for a decade. At the same time his thirst for knowledge impelled his extremely able mind to rigorously study, and he became a successful student of rhetoric. A series of personal experiences led him to his unique approach to philosophy. He was 19 years old when he read the Hortensius of Cicero, which was an exhortative to achieve philosophical wisdom. These words of Cicero kindled his passion for learning, but he was left with the problem of where to find intellectual certainty. His Christian ideas seemed unsatisfactory to him. He was particularly perplexed by the present problem of moral evil. How can we explain the existence of evil in human experience? The Christians had said that God is the creator of all things and also that God is good. How then it is possible for evil to arise out of a world that a perfectly good God had created? Because Augustine could not find an answer min the Christianity he learned as a youth, he turned to a group called the Manicheans who are boasting of their intellectual capacity or superiority, rejected the basic monotheism of the old testament and with it the doctrine of the creator and redeemer of the humanity are one and the same. Instead, the Manicheans taught a doctrine of dualism, according to which there were two principles in the universe, the principle of light and goodness. During that time, he broke with the Manicheans, feeling that ³those philosophers whom they call Academics (skeptics) were wiser than the rest in thinking that we ought to doubt everything, and that no truth can be comprehended by man.´ He was now attracted to Skepticism, though at the same time he retained some belief in God. He maintained a materialistic view of things and on this account doubted the existence of immaterial substance and immortality of the soul. St. Augustine was a platonic and a Manichean, but for him true philosophy was inconceivable without a confluence of faith and reason. For Augustine, wisdom was Christian wisdom. Reason without revelation was certainly possible, since he came to believe that there is no such thing as a purely natural person without some ultimate spiritual destiny. In his theory of knowledge, Augustine explains to us when a person senses objects, he or
she derives some knowledge from this act of sensation. But according to Augustine, such sense knowledge is at the lowest level of knowing. Still, the sense does give us a kind of knowledge. What puts sense knowledge at the lowest level is that it gives us the least amount of certainty. What reduce the certainty of sense knowledge are two things; first, the object of sense are always changing, and second, that the organs of the sense change. For these two reasons, sensation varies from time to time and between persons. The question is what happens when we sense an object? To answer this question Augustine replied upon his platonic interpretation of humanity. A person is a union of body and soul. But when he describes how the soul attains knowledge, he departed from platonic theory of recollection. When we see an object, the soul fashions out of its own substance an image of an object. Moreover, when we sense an object, we only sense an image but also make a judgment. For example, we look at a person and say she is beautiful. This act of judgment indicate that I not only see the person with my senses, but also compare her with the standard which my mind has access in some realm other than that in which I sense the person with my senses. Sensation, then gives us knowledge, but its chief characteristic is that it necessarily points beyond its objects. From the sensation, we are moved to think about straightness and bentness, from the person to beauty. In our daily life as I have reflected about, we see things as it is, but we do not see what its substance is, we only see the accidental part of it, but what is necessary is to see what the real substance of a thing or a person before we judge his or her accidental.
she derives some knowledge from this act of sensation. But according to Augustine, such sense knowledge is at the lowest level of knowing. Still, the sense does give us a kind of knowledge. What puts sense knowledge at the lowest level is that it gives us the least amount of certainty. What reduce the certainty of sense knowledge are two things; first, the object of sense are always changing, and second, that the organs of the sense change. For these two reasons, sensation varies from time to time and between persons. The question is what happens when we sense an object? To answer this question Augustine replied upon his platonic interpretation of humanity. A person is a union of body and soul. But when he describes how the soul attains knowledge, he departed from platonic theory of recollection. When we see an object, the soul fashions out of its own substance an image of an object. Moreover, when we sense an object, we only sense an image but also make a judgment. For example, we look at a person and say she is beautiful. This act of judgment indicate that I not only see the person with my senses, but also compare her with the standard which my mind has access in some realm other than that in which I sense the person with my senses. Sensation, then gives us knowledge, but its chief characteristic is that it necessarily points beyond its objects. From the sensation, we are moved to think about straightness and bentness, from the person to beauty. In our daily life as I have reflected about, we see things as it is, but we do not see what its substance is, we only see the accidental part of it, but what is necessary is to see what the real substance of a thing or a person before we judge his or her accidental.
