Church Fathers and Augustine

2019-03-28 0 views

The Church Fathers

Tertullian

The North African church father Tertullian is very critical of attempts of Christian Platonism or a Christian Aristoteleanism because of what he sees the influence of Gnosticism to Christian theology. It’s Tertullian who said I believe what is absurd in his work “The Body of Christ”. In the context that the gnostic said the idea of divine incarnation is absurd. He has taken to Stoic philosophical ideas. He maintains that the goodness of the material world by virtue of the Logos who orders the material world.

Justin Martyr

Tertullian is the one who goes furthest with the Stoics. The others tend to be more favorably inclined towards Platonism, Justin Martyr was a Platonist before he was a Christian. He rejects the Stoic materialistic view of the soul. He prefers Plato’s view of a transcendent God who by virtue of Logos created and ordered the world directly, and the human soul is immaterial. He plays with the question that how come some Greeks like Plato seems to get so close to the truth? And it entertains two possibilities, one is Plato must have read books of Moses, the other is that they too were enlightened by the divine Logos, who enlightens everyone who comes to the world.

Clement of Alexandria & Philo of Alexandria

Clement of Alexandria was very much aware of the Middle Platonism and very appreciated it. Probably because of the influence of Philo Alexandria, who accepts the notion of emanation. The one God who created the world has given us both the Greek philosophy and the law of Moses. Philo creates a Jewish version of Neo-Platonism, equating the Platonic conception with Jewish conceptions. So he adopts an allegorical interpretation of the Scripture. Clement tries to bring the Greek Philosophy to the defense of the Gospel against gnosticism. The thing he particularly opposed to in gnosticism is one idea that through gaining knowledge we find salvation, he insists that salvation is not by knowledge but by faith. Second is the notion that human soul is the emanation of God. The third is the determinism and materialism such as he find in the Stoics.

Origen of Alexandria

The forth church father Origen of Alexandria is much more explicit in trying to bring Greek metaphysical concepts into union with Christian belief. He stresses is that the God is the One, beyond all reason, thought, definition and differentiation. The creation is a necessary expression of God’s being. Mediating from the God, the One and the creation is the Logos. The Logos is a personal divine being, who becomes incarnating Christ, which is in John chapter one, the Word become flesh. Sometimes he uses the language of emanation, Logos is the emanation of a person being, with the further emanation preceding the Holy Spirit. Therefore the Middle Platonic and Neo Platonic Trinity are being spoken of in terms of the Christian Trinity of by Origen. It’s the Holy Spirit created immaterial human soul.

Summary

The genius of the Church Fathers is that using the language, they realizes that they are adopting the concept, and they are extremely cautious about what they did with it. It’s hard to find any developed theology which isn’t dependent on some philosophical scheme. Luther, Ockham’s Nominalism; Calvin, Seneca, Cicero, Stoicism; Charles Hodge, Scottish realism; Augustus Hopkins Strong, personal idealism. Theology is using language and concepts that are drawn from comparable philosophical positions.

Philosophy of History of Philosophy

There is a variety of world view traditions developed in parallel through the history of western thought, there were certain major junctures, in transition from Medieval to Modern, in the time of Renaissance, from 1400-1500, from Enlightenment to Romanticism and Post modern thought, from 1800-1900. The three main period have to do with the scientific models that change, where you have the Greek science emphasis on the explanation in terms of Forms and Matter, Mechanistic science from the scientific resolution in terms of Matter and Motion and the more organic and relational picture in 19th century. In the meantime, for world view, we might be dealing with Naturalist, Idealist and Theistic Philosophies, all of them are working with the same model during that period of time.

Augustine & Neo-Platonism

In the beginning, Augustine was attracted to Manichean dualism, which is a form of gnosticism. which says the matter is evil and it provides no hope for the triumph of Good over Evil. Being introduced to Neo-Platonism, Augustine is able to escape Manicheanism. That provided the vehicle for him to thinking his way beyond dualism towards a consistent Christian Theism. In City of God Book 8, Augustine tells why he thought highly about Plato and Platonism. The things which he gains from Platonism is that first the God is not a material being, but a incorporeal Spirit, and it is the source of all being. God is the Good, Evil is a privation of something that is Good. And the human soul is immaterial as well, it is able to distinguish between true and false without sense experience, by dialectic. The soul is not limited by space and time like the body is. He then echoes the Plato’s emphasis in Neo-Platonism on two loves, there is a love for things below the divided line, and a love for things above. It’s getting immersed with desire for things below which causes the fall of the soul into the body and its enslavement in a body and the intellect can save us by focusing on things that are above. He likes the story of two loves but doesn’t like that it’s the intellect that saves us. The result of the two love is that Augustine develops the Christian ethics as the ethics of love, translating not just in terms of Eros, but in the new Testament Agape. And the central theme of his ethic is that love is the underlying significance of the moral law. He talks of the Greek virtues, temperance, justice, wisdom in the context of fulfilling love.

Evil & Good

There are two problems with regards to how to convert to Platonism to Christians. First is the problem of evil. He is explicit that at least the evil in us, is not due to the way in which a body drag us down in some deterministic fashion, but he says that the evil we do is because of the free choice of the will. It is a voluntary account of human behavior. Because of our sin is the result of free choice of the will, deliverance does not come from contemplating the higher good, but from freely choosing and loving the higher good. In Augustine’s early writings, he views is closer to Neo-Platonist, he seems to think body kept dragging us away from the higher good. But later he gives more positive value to bodily things. For Augustine the middle level between higher and lower(the divided line) is not the intellectual but the will. Reason can not overcome the passions. In the final analysis, we are not ruled by what we know, we are ruled by what we love. It marks the major breaks between the Greek thought and the Christian thought. In various ways, Greek thought seems to say that we are ruled by reason in the moral life, there are some readings from Plato that says if you know what is good you’ll do what is good. It is not a free choice of will as it is for Augustine.

Emanation & Ex nihalo

Augustine sees the difference between pantheism from theory of emanation and theism from creation ex nihalo. He says if the theory of emanation is right, if some animal is butchered, it would mean a part of God is slaughtered, then God is not the good. On the other hand, Augustine objects of the notion of intermediary beings. In order to influence us, God has to go through all the intermediary beings, isn’t the Christian story that God act directly? And there is a increasing inferiority of being in the hierarchy, which does not fit into the Christian understanding of the Trinity since Jesus is of the same substance of the Father. He insists that the Son is co-equal with the Father and co-eternal with the Father.

Augustine’s Christian Philosophy

The Theory of Forms

In the heart of the Augustine’s Christianized Platonism, is the theory of Forms. Augustine sees the Forms as both transcendent in the mind of God and immanent in the creation. In the mind of God, the Forms are the eternal truth, and in the creation itself, it is seminal truth, seeds that give capacities for the development in nature. The seminal forms are the forms that give order, nature to various species.

How We know the Forms

That immediately start posing the epistemological questions, how can we know the Forms. In the work of Plato you get one answer: by dialectic. In Aristotle, you get another answer, in as much as Forms are imminent within things by abstracting from thought from our experiences of classes of particulars. Different interpretors of Augustine comes up with different theory, one says there is God given innate knowledge, so that we come into this life with pipeline of God by virtue of which those ideas to be present in the mind. There is another view that somehow human mind is able to get direct access to the mind of God, this would mean the soul would hold the essence of God. What is the account from Augustine? For Augustine, it is rather God illuminate the human mind than human get direct access to God’s mind. All human beings has access to eternal truth concerning the nature of created things by virtue of general kind of illumination of human mind. He quote John 1 about the Logos, the light that lightens everyone that comes into the world. Therefore both the epistemological function in enlightening the mind and the metaphysical function in ordering the creation are important about the Logos. In his book “Against the Academics”, he argues that all may possess truth, his examples of truth that we possess includes logical truth, knowledge of self-existence, he talks about role of dialectic in bring in the truth to the light of understanding.

The Human Soul

In the first place, the soul is not a material thing, it’s an immaterial substance. Again, soul is not some pre-existing eternal things, the reason is that it is subject to change, it may not be a spatial things but it’s a temporal thing. He explores three views of origins of the individual soul. One is the theory of pre-existence which he rejects. He considered the view that soul is transmitted in physical reproduction. And he considers that the soul is created separated by God. But he is not sure which of the last two views is correct. Therefore, a human person, is a rational soul using a body. Later he thinks that this doesn’t give body its full place and he tends to say it’s rational soul with a body. The immortality of the soul is the immaterial substance part of a composite substance, which is the whole person. He also uses some of the Plato’s arguments for the immortality of soul.

Time & Eternity

This is another case where you have what seems like a Platonic point of view that get converted to Christianity. Time for Plato is a changing image of eternal. In theory of divided line, in the realm of time, we have changing particulars, in the realm of eternal, we have unchanging Forms. For Aristotle, time is simply the measure of physical motion. Augustine’s view takes more from Plato. He exercises the introspective psychological description, examining the psychology of time and consciousness. Within the soul, it’s only the present time that is real. The past becomes present in virtue of memory, the future becomes present in anticipation, but only the present is real. Times comes into existence and pass away, it is the realm of change, of becoming, of generation and dis-generation. All time are present in the soul, and all time are present now in the soul. God is eternal, unchanging and timeless, because if there is no change in God, there is no past that cease to be or a future that come into being, he is in that sense beyond time. There is debate on whether God is timeless or ever-lasting through time, for example “God and Timelessness” from Nelson Pike.

Religious Experience

How do we get beyond the natural knowledge of God? In Neo-Platonic tradition, there is a mystical approach to God. In Book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions, he asks what do I love when I love God. It’s not that I love physical beauty, rather it is in my soul because there are glimpses of eternity in my soul, that all times are present now in my soul. When I love God, what I love is something in my soul, so I must reach him through my soul, beyond the life that joins body and soul, beyond of memory of past sense perceptions, beyond the knowledge that I have from dialectic, my feelings. But rather I’m looking for the Good that rejoices in the truth.

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