In the history of the Church there are very special, turning events that determine the further development of theological thought. One of them was the works of the most prominent theologian and teacher of the Church, Augustine the Blessed. Aurelius Augustine of Hippo is the most prominent representative of medieval philosophy , revered in the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant faiths with the rank of blessed. His works not only systematized the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, but also introduced into Christian dogmatics a powerful philosophical apparatus that was so necessary for it.
Philosophy of St. Augustine
Medieval systems of philosophy were religiously oriented towards Christian dogmas, one of which was the dogma of the personality of the one Lord.
His promotion is associated with the name of Augustine the Blessed. Thanks to this, the Christian branch of the West separated from the East, turning into Catholicism. Augustine is a prominent thinker of the Middle Ages who laid a powerful foundation for religious and philosophical thought, describing his beliefs in numerous works.
He inspired many philosophical ideas and movements, and was also a teacher and mentor in scientific methodology, ethical, aesthetic and historical views.
Influence on Christianity
The work of the holy father had an influence on the further development of Christian dogma and anthropology. His developments in the field of the concept of grace and the concept of original sin became especially important. The philosophical movement of Augustinianism emerged - the further development of the ideas of the Neoplatonists in the vein of the Christian worldview. The doctrine dominated in Western Europe until the emergence of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas with his new Aristotelianism. And during the Reformation, ideas about predestination were adopted by Calvinist Protestants.
Curriculum Vitae
Augustine was born in Algeria, the city of Tagaste, in 354. After graduating from the school of rhetoricians, he begins to teach oratory in Carthage.
Next, Augustine goes to Rome, and then to Milan, taking the place of rhetorician in the state there. school. Here, his speeches receive recognition. Augustine actively supported paganism, fighting Christian teaching.
For 9 years, he is in the company of the Manichaeans, but then becomes convinced of the groundlessness of this teaching.
Having become acquainted with the works of Ambrose of Milan, in 387 Augustine was baptized and returned to Algeria, where he became the founder of the Christian community. After the death of Bishop Valery of Hippo, Augustine himself became a bishop.
Augustine actively fights heresy, speaking out in defense of the great church, since it is this that he considers the path to salvation. During this period of his life, Augustine writes several works explaining complex passages of the Bible, preaches, and acts as a judge.
Afterwards comes the denunciation of the Donatists. The Bishop of Numidia defended the opinion that heretics who had renounced the faith should not be accepted into one’s ranks. Augustine, at a conference of bishops, proved that church holiness depends only on the power of grace, which is transmitted through the sacraments.
But the toughest controversy arose around Pelagius and his students. The basis of their teaching is that a Christian man is the creator of his own salvation. The philosophy of Augustine the Blessed asserts that God's grace also exists. At the Council of Carthage in 417, Augustine won this dispute, and plagiarism was condemned.
Aurelius’ thoughts were reflected in such most important works for the history of philosophy as “Confession”, “On Free Will”, “On the Teacher”, “On True Religion”.
He died in 430 in the city of Hippo.
Proceedings
Creativity of St. Augustine served as a kind of “leaven” for the theological school of all Western Christianity. To this day, his creations inspire many authors.
There are three fundamental works of St. Blessed Augustine Aurelius of Hippo, they contain the entirety of his theology. This is the autobiographical “Confession” , the dogmatic work “Treatise on the Trinity” and the historiosophical teaching “ On the City of God ”.
Christ on the throne, archangels Michael and Gabriel and St. Gregory, Martin, Ambrose and Augustine First half of the 12th century. Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, Italy Mosaics in the apse of the deaconne.
Theological researches of St. Augustine can hardly be called completely original; for example, his treatise on the Trinity is a reflection on the topic of all interpretations of Trinitarian dogmatics known at that time. St. Augustine Aurelius is one of the holy fathers who admits and practices the rational knowledge of God “inrationally”, as opposed to the Eastern theological school, the basis of which was hesychasm - practical, experimental knowledge of God.
Augustine's ontology is partly justified by his philosophical worldview. Christian Neoplatonists, to whom Augustine belonged, identified the One of Platonism with the One God, and absolute reason or Logos with the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Being created by the good Lord, insofar as it exists and precisely because it exists and comes from God, is good.
In the theodicy of St. Augustine, evil does not have its own essence, since it is not created; it is the opposite of good, its lack, damage or vice, a kind of corruption. The source of good existence is the Lord, the highest degree of goodness, beauty, the most beautiful form of everything. According to Augustine the Blessed, the world exists in the constant act of its creation by God, it even exists only because the creative power of the Lord does not dry out. There is one Creator and one world, some other worlds are a play of the imagination.
God and the soul are the main objects of human knowledge: the existence of man in its spiritual component is similar to the existence of God, which means that it is knowable with the help of reason, and the existence of things is known from sensory experience.
St. Augustine in his books writes about the act of introspection as the possibility of man’s knowledge of God through the image of God contained in man himself. He analyzes the idea of God in relation to man, and man in relation to the Creator. Augustine's philosophical anthropology is filled with love for God and the world He created.
Soul, teaches St. Augustine the Blessed, immaterial and not finite. The idea of the origin and immortality of the soul was not finally defined by him. He hesitated between the idea of the transition of the soul from parents to the baby and the ideas of its creation by the Lord.
The teaching of St. Augustine Aurelius's idea of the Holy Spirit logically follows from his ideas about the Holy Trinity , it is somewhat different from the traditional one. According to the teachings of the Cappadocians, the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity differ only in the relationship of the persons to each other - the Father eternally gives birth to the Son (Logos), the Son is eternally born from God the Father, and the Holy Spirit eternally emanates from God the Father. The expression “God is Love” refers to the entire Trinity. The seemingly meager description comes from the apophatic theological tradition, in which one of the divine qualities is unknowability.
Based on the experience of self-knowledge, Augustine postulates: “The Holy Spirit cannot be a nameless hypostasis, which means that the procession of the Holy Spirit is the very love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father.”
It's interesting that St. Augustine draws conclusions introspectively, analyzing human relationships. The father loves his child, and the child loves his father, love itself comes from them, argues St. Augustine. If in Eastern Christianity they could not distinguish how love differs from procession, in Western theology the view of St. Augustine was firmly entrenched for a long time - the Holy Spirit is love.
The famous “filioque,” which served as a bone of contention between Rome and Byzantium, partly owes its appearance to misunderstood Augustinian ideas about the Holy Spirit.
According to the teachings of Augustine the Blessed about original sin, God created the first people in a special state of free will and gave them commandments so that people would fulfill them. From a state of free will or “possibility to sin,” people, gradually, being in love and obedience to the Lord, had to move into a state of “impossibility to sin.”
The condition for this transition was “the grace of pristine righteousness.” Having broken the commandments, people lost this grace and became unable to resist evil. Their new state is “the impossibility of not sinning.” Some Western modern authors believe that St. Augustine created this concept in a polemic with the monk Pelagius, who taught that original sin had no effect on human nature.
According to St. Augustine, illness, sorrow and death resulting from the Fall are necessary to limit our ability to do evil.
The sin of the forefathers is removed in the Sacrament of Baptism. Man is again taught the “ grace of primordial righteousness” and he returns to the primordial state of grace of “the ability not to sin.” St. Augustine teaches that if a person is not baptized, he does not have the “grace of original righteousness,” the fate of the unbaptized is terrible, even infants will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, since original sin remains on them. In Orthodox dogmatics, this teaching is considered a theologumen, a private theological opinion.
The authority of St. Augustine contributed to the emergence of the tradition of mass baptism of children. In the Western Christian tradition, the baptism of a newborn has become a kind of guarantee of the salvation of his soul. In the Eastern tradition, a number of holy fathers speak about the mystery of divine soteriology, for example, St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches that God will save everyone.
Another important aspect of the Augustinian concept of the Fall is monoenergism. According to St. Augustine, as a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve, total damage to human nature occurred. Of the three components of a person - feelings, reason and will, it was the will that suffered the most and the least - the mind.
Man has become a completely weak-willed creature. He not only cannot be saved, but he cannot even want to be saved. God Himself chooses a person and, as it were, pushes him, giving him the grace necessary for this. And a person is unable to refuse. First, grace evokes in him a desire for the Kingdom of God; in response to the desire, which is essentially what God produces, grace gives a person faith and leads to a righteous life. There is no human merit here and there cannot be. From St. Eastern teachers of the Church, who created the doctrine of synergy, “cooperation” between man and God in the matter of salvation, do not agree with Augustine.
In order to logically explain how God chooses who to save and who not to save, St. Augustine refers to the divine quality of omniscience. The omniscient Lord foresees which of the people will be saved, therefore it is they who bestow grace and lead them to the Kingdom of Heaven. St. Augustine does not specify what will happen to the others.
The doctrine of man's merits before God became the main feature of Protestantism. No less important for the development of philosophical and historical European thought was the work of St. Blessed Augustine Aurelius "On the City of God". On the pages of this grandiose twenty-two-volume book, he wanted to comprehend the fate of humanity from Adam and Eve to the present day. This is a view of history not as a chain of chaotic, unrelated events, but the first attempt of historiosophy - the search for the wisdom of God in the history of human existence.
Two cities exist on earth: the City of God, created by God’s love for man, and the Earthly City, a consequence of human egoism, his love for himself - a sinful and evil city. According to St. Augustine, the two cities experience six main eras: from the creation of Adam to the birth of Christ. The sixth era began with Christ and will end with the Last Judgment, then the citizens of the “city of God” will receive heavenly bliss, and the citizens of the “earthly city” will undergo eternal torment.
The incarnation of the Earthly City for St. Augustine Aurelius was Rome - the center of persecution of the Christian Church. The saint wrote an essay about the “City of God” under the impression of the destruction of the “eternal city,” which he considered a punishment for sins. In 410, Rome was destroyed by the Visigoth hordes. Despite some legendary status of Augustine's concept, it was the first attempt to create a Christian philosophy of history.
In 430, already an elderly theologian and philosopher, the good shepherd St. Augustine Aurelius of Hipponia, the Blessed, shared the tragic fate of his city, conquered by wild tribes of Vandals. He remained with his flock to the end. It is unknown whether he was killed or died during the attack on Hippo. The teachings of this father of the Church, revered in three denominations, laid the foundation for further theological and philosophical research. His difficult “many sins” life, in part, became a refutation of monoenergism, and his long path to the Lord, full of quests, served as an example that salvation is possible for every person, there are many paths, all of them are open.
Augustine the Blessed is canonized not only by the Eastern, but also by the Western Church. Currently there are churches of the saint in Paris, Vienna, and other cities. In the V century. Christians, fleeing from the Arians, took the remains of St. Augustine to Cagliari (Sardinia), and in the 8th century. the relics were bought by Liutprand, the Lombard king (northwestern Italy), and then transferred to the capital, Pavia.
Philosophical beliefs of St. Augustine
Following Plotinus, divine existence according to Augustine is an absolute concept that should be considered in contrast to man and the universe. But, departing from the teachings of Plotinus, the theologian denies that God and the world are one. In his opinion, the existence of God is above nature, God himself is independent of the universe and humanity, while the world and man are completely dependent on the divine nature. Augustine considered God a person who is the creator of all things on earth.
Further, Augustine's creationism flows into fatalism, according to which nature and man are completely and directly dependent on the divine will, and God is constantly in charge of the world. This view of the universe is the basis of Augustinianism; it leads to an irrational interpretation of the world. Augustine imagined reality as filled with miracles that are beyond the control of the human mind.
The philosopher believes that angels and souls were created first. Everything else on earth is matter, which is an inert substrate without form. But 4 elements - earth, water, fire, air, as well as celestial bodies, were created once in a completed form.
Augustine's teaching denies the idea of evolution, but there are living creatures on earth whose development takes place almost throughout life. The philosopher explains this idea by germinal reasons.
Augustine considers the divine being to be eternal and unchangeable. The duality of God and nature is the contrast between God's existence and the ever-changing material world.
In the Augustinian era, the church was a strong link in society. She could have a serious influence in the political sphere.
Stages of Augustine's creativity
There are three main periods of the thinker's activity, which reflected the evolution of his views - it is characterized by a gradual shift of emphasis from ancient philosophy to the problems of eschatology, church dogma and defense of the faith.
First
386-395 AD It is distinguished by the strong influence of Neoplatonism and rationalism. Philosophical dialogues come from the pen of Aurelius, and the evidence base for the theory of the seven liberal arts is given. Works on music theory, theological works and a series of works on the criticism of Manichaeism are being written.
Second
395-410 AD The main milestone is the ordination of bishops. Augustine is engaged in biblical studies, composing commentaries on the texts of Scripture, moral treatises and polemics against Donatist heretics. He writes "Confession" - his famous biographical work.
Third
410-430 AD In his declining years, the church father wrote denunciations of Pelagianism and focused on the problems of eschatology and the universe. The treatise “On the City of God”, the main historical and philosophical work, was published.
The concept of good and evil
The philosopher's concept of evil corresponds to the ideas of Neoplatonism, where evil is the negation of good. Based on the Bible, which describes the goodness of the creator, Augustine provides evidence that everything that exists is connected with it. When creating material objects, God laid in them a certain mass, measuring value and order. He took as a basis his conclusions for everything material, thus extraterrestrial images are imprinted in things. No change in the thing during its existence will affect this fact; the image is preserved. That is, they contain goodness. Good, according to Augustinian teaching, is the absence of evil. There is no isolated concept of evil.
This is the theodicy (justification of God) of Aurelius. Its social meaning is very clear. It consists in the fact that the most prominent follower of Christianity, Augustine the Blessed, sought to reconcile believers with this existing order of ordinary things. He called not to condemn evil, but to be grateful for all the good that exists in the world. Evil was not created by God, it appeared because the measure of goodness decreased. A person must go through the temptation of evil in order to understand the universe and his essence.
Doctrine of Man by Augustine the Blessed
Augustine considers man in his moral dimension. He is interested in the question - what kind of person should be. To do this, in turn, it was necessary to explain what free will is, good and evil, and where they come from. Man, according to Augustine, was created by God, who endowed him with body, soul, mind and free will. However, a person falls into original sin, which consists in serving his corporeality, in the desire to comprehend not the truth of God, but to comprehend the pleasures of bodily existence.
The Fall inevitably leads to evil. Hence the thesis - evil is not in the world, evil is in man, generated by his will. Loss of faith involuntarily leads people to create evil, although subjectively they strive for good. They no longer know what they are doing. The existence and life of a person acquires a tragic and torn character. And on their own, without the help of God, people cannot free themselves from evil, interrupt the tragic nature of existence.
For a person, a moral duty, according to Augustine, is to follow the Divine commandments and become as much like Christ as possible. Faith helps a person gain moral guidelines. One of the main virtues, Augustine believes, is overcoming selfishness and boundless love for one’s neighbor. He wrote that through the love of every person for his neighbor as a brother, the feeling of hatred and selfishness, selfishness is pacified in the heart. The other person must become the moral target: “Every person, because he is a man, should be loved for God’s sake.”
According to Augustine, conscience is of great importance on the path of moral improvement of a person. Conscience is the subtlest means of self-control. It allows you to correlate the thoughts and actions of an individual with the ideal of what should be. Since a person needs to be constantly attentive to the smallest movements of his soul, therefore conscience as a moral phenomenon acquires cardinal importance. Augustine was the first to show—and this is his merit—that the life of the soul is something incredibly complex and hardly fully definable.
Considering the problem of the moral transformation of man, Augustine inevitably turns to questions about the principles of social structure and the meaning of history.
The human soul: will and comprehension
Another direction of Augustine’s philosophical teaching is reflection on the will. The Christian philosopher insists that the human spirit and man himself are immaterial. He considered even natural beings not endowed with a soul. The soul is inherent only in man; it is rational. Only man is to one degree or another similar to God. Augustine's idea boils down to the fact that each person is individual and spiritually unique.
The soul is immortal and infinite, existing even after the death of a person. The theologian views the soul as a substance in no way connected with the bodily essence of man. The soul gives the human body the ability to think, remember, and exercise will.
The presence of memory allows you to save all the events that fill human life in some spaceless place. And this is proof that the soul is immaterial, so it retains all received emotions, knowledge, impressions with the help of the senses.
The soul is necessary to control the body. Man is a soul. But the philosopher considers the very essence of the soul more in the volitional aspect than in the mental aspect. Augustine considers the will to be the basis of human activity, which has an undoubted advantage over rational activity. The thinker calls for a constant search for the highest truth and strong will; his works are filled with passion and emotions.
Prayers
Troparion, tone 4
Following Christ with all my heart, St. Augustine, / you sealed the truth in word and deed, / and you appeared as the unslothful eradicator of wicked heresies, / praying to the Holy Trinity, / / yes will save our souls.
Kontakion, tone 4
The unshakable pillar of the Universal Church,/ founded on the immovable rock of faith,/ the dogma of Orthodoxy unflattering to the teacher/ and the loud-voiced preacher of repentance,/ the sealer of the truth,/ the most praiseworthy Augustine,// Saint of Christ.
On the relationship between faith and reason
In Augustine’s worldview, irrational-volitional indicators are superior to rational indicators that are amenable to logic, and this is expressed in the predominance of faith over reason. The philosopher extolled faith in the Lord as the foundation and beginning of human knowledge. But sinners Adam and Eve weakened divine authority. After this, a person needs to believe and constantly look within himself for support in revelation to God. Faith comes before understanding. Previously, the fulfillment of faith was sought in the Bible. Augustine asserted undeniable church authority, where the church is the highest authority of truth. This statement of Bishop Hippo was reflected in the situation that arose after the strengthening of the position of the church as a centralized and institutional organization.
The thinker not only argued that faith dominates reason - he tried to give a philosophical explanation for this. If we proceed from the fact that the basis of a person’s knowledge is his own and acquired experience, then Augustine placed greater emphasis on the second, which is more significant and rich. He called the experience gained faith. But the philosopher unjustifiably summed it up by comparing faith in the knowledge received with faith in the Lord and sacred authorities.
The main conclusion of Augustinian thinking about faith and reason is the disparagement of reason. The thinker believed that without religious revelation, reason is illogical and unfounded. Augustine's entire teaching boils down to the fact that reason is deprived of independence.
Evolution of spiritual life
Augustine worked towards the creation of his teaching all his life. His views on the structure of the universe, the essence of God and the purpose of man changed repeatedly. The main stages of his spiritual development include the following:
The influence of maternal upbringing on worldview. Monica's religious views served as a prerequisite for Augustine's spiritual quest and led to his conversion to Christianity.- Acquaintance with the works of the Roman thinker, philosopher, orator and politician Cicero. After reading “Hortensia,” a nineteen-year-old boy began to ask questions about good and evil, the meaning of human life. It was the writings of Cicero that prompted Augustine to take philosophy seriously.
- Passion for Manichaeism, which claimed to be a universal religion and strived for a reasonable explanation of the world order. This doctrine is based on the idea of the existence of two opposite principles, whose names are Light and Darkness. The main task of man is to strive for Light and life. Matter (one of the components of Darkness) tries to hinder people and keep them in sin and error. After death, the souls of the righteous will live forever with the Gods. A special place is prepared for sinners - Bolos, from which it is no longer possible to get out.
- Disappointment in Manichaeism. The main reason was Augustine’s meeting with Faustus, the spiritual leader of the Manichaeans, who was unable to intelligibly answer the questions that worried the inquisitive young man. Later Augustine would express regret about the ten years he spent on this teaching.
- Meeting with the Bishop of Milan. Ambrose's sermons made a strong impression on Augustine. He returns to reading the Bible again. But now some of the scenes described in the Old Testament do not seem absurd and inappropriate to him. Ambrose seemed to open Augustine's eyes to the true meaning of biblical events. He studies the letters of the Apostle Paul, listens to stories about monks and hermits, and has conversations with the holy fathers. Gradually, Augustine comes to the conclusion that Christianity is the only true teaching that he had been looking for for so long.
- The fight against heretics. Augustine devoted the rest of his life to Christian service to God and tried in every possible way to prevent the spread of other religious concepts and teachings, including Manichaean, Danotian and Pelagian. (Danotists believed that the true church was the “church of the poor,” located in Africa, and opposed the subordination of Christian communities to Rome. According to supporters of the monk Pelagius, the descendants of Adam are endowed with free will and are not defiled by original sin).
Time and eternity
Aurelius made a significant contribution to the development of philosophical views about time. Augustine recognized the complexity of thinking about it. He constantly asks God for enlightenment. For the philosopher, the undoubted truth was that time is a measure of change and movement that is inherent in all created things. There was no time before the creation of the world; its appearance is associated with God's creativity. When the Lord created everything material, the measure of its variability was also created.
Analyzing the very definition of time, Augustine tried to understand its main characteristics - past, present and future. As a result, he came to the conclusion that neither the past nor the future exists, there is only the present, in which one can think about past or future events. Thus, the past is only in human memory, and the future is reflected in hope.
Augustine's worldview reduces the past and future to the present time. But he also has the desire to slow down such a rapid movement of time. In reality, this is not possible. In the divine universe, everything exists now, without any “before” and “after”.
Eternity is static and is an integral part of God's being. Augustine contrasts the eternal existence of the Lord and the constant variability of the world of material things - this is one of the foundations of the philosopher’s views.
Concept of science and wisdom
Augustine explained the difference between science and wisdom from a theological point of view. In short, the knowledge that develops into science is a reasonable study of the world, which makes it possible to use material things. And wisdom is the study of the spiritual world, the providence of God. Man must subordinate science to wisdom. Proclaiming this principle, the philosopher showed this stage in the formation of Mediterranean thinking as a barbarization of mental development and an expansion of moral consciousness. This philosophy of Augustine the Blessed showed very characteristic features of the dying ancient culture - it was turning into the culture of the feudal society of the Middle Ages.
Knowledge, following the philosophy of Augustine Aurelius, is not evil; it is necessary for the development of the material world. But knowledge should not turn into the goal of a person’s life; he should strive for divine knowledge.
Based on these conclusions, the Christian philosopher outlined a program in which scientific knowledge is subordinated to the interests of Christian teaching, the implementation of the foundations of which became the main characteristic feature of the spiritual development of Western European feudal society. Since the whole essence of wisdom is presented in the Bible and church foundations.
