- 18 Mar, 2021
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How Augustine understands the relation between the idea of natural order and the possibilities for political order
Reason and faith – Insofar as no philosophy can demonstrate the truth its own presuppositions, it must always rely on some element of faith. With Christian thought, however, it becomes a major issue because in its infancy Christianity had to assert itself against already established pagan religions and philosophies. The question is, given the fact that for Christianity the highest Truth is a matter of faith, and yet faith has no power beyond the community of believers unless it is connected to reason, what exactly is the relation between reason and faith? Many pagan thinkers scoffed at those Christians who, holding faith to be supreme, found no use for rational argument (an example here is often associated with Tertullian, an early Church Father, who said of Christian doctrine, credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd”). Augustine, however, attempts to break with this sort of anti-intellectualism, not by attempting to demonstrate the existence of the Christian God through rational argument, nor by reducing the role of reason to simply judging among a select number of interpretations of Scripture by those who already accept the faith, but by maintaining that reason can achieve nothing without faith (hence Augustine’s credo ut intelligum, “believe so you may understand”). Augustine also goes further and holds that Christianity can be demonstrated to be a rationally superior faith against those pagan doctrines that are sufficiently oriented towards the same concerns. Reason, in this sense, cannot confirm belief, but it can eliminate false contenders, providing they are all contending for the same thing. Unsurprisingly, Augustine is very selective with the pagans with whom he chooses to debate. He does not, for example, engage much with atheists, nor with the Epicureans, who hold that the gods do not concern themselves with the world, because these groups do not share the necessary assumptions concerning the purpose of religion. But for those who hold that the purpose of religion is the attainment of happiness, Augustine feels he can show that Christianity is a superior faith, because it alone truly satisfies this requirement.
Critique of paganism – Augustine’s presents a gross caricature of polytheism, but it does illustrate his concerns well. His central claim is that no credible faith can come from a religion that believes in a multiplicity of gods. In the first place, he argues, the pagans have absurdly invented a different god for everything: there are three gods with different functions in guarding doors, a different god for each crop planted, various gods who protect women during childbirth, one who joins man and woman together, another who escorts the bride home, and several more who participate in the first night’s activities. Even worse, with so many gods there can be no clear hierarchy among them, so that each one in some sense disrupts or trumps the power of others. Jupiter, for example, is the king of the gods, and yet there is also a goddess Victory: why should a nation worship Jupiter when it can win every war as long as Victory is on its side? There is a goddess Felicity (happiness) who, should she grant the world perpetual peace, would leave Mars (the god of war) unemployed. Indeed, Augustine asks, why should anyone worship any gods other than Felicity and Virtue, who together would provide the highest human goods? With all of this, Augustine says, polytheism fails to provide any god that can secure human happiness and therefore it fails in its core task. Happiness means, ultimately, the promise of eternal life – since, Augustine asserts, this is “clearly” the greatest good – and no pagan god with limited powers can guarantee it. The great error of paganism, Augustine says, is that it makes every good into a separate god, rather than realizing that all goods come from one supreme God. Only the Platonists, he says, come close to realizing the truth, as they recognize that all things refer back to a supreme Good. The Platonists, moreover, have their own version of the Trinity – with the Good also the highest Being and the One – though they lack the Word of Scripture. Augustine attributes this proximity to an apocryphal story that held that Plato journeyed to Egypt and came in contact with the Old Testament (and, since the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the story holds that someone had to read and translate the text into Greek for Plato). In other words, Augustine maintains that whatever truth Plato discovered was plagiarized from the Jews!
One God and the question of evil – If the criteria for judging a religion is its ability to secure happiness, then the most credible faith, for Augustine, is one that posits a supreme God who is at once omnipotent and benevolent. God must be all-powerful to guarantee the promise of eternal salvation and He must be completely good to guarantee His interest in saving humans. But the supposed rational superiority of this belief is immediately put to the test by the question of the origin of evil. Put simply, if God is all powerful and benevolent, how can evil exist and how can He not be responsible for it? It is obvious, Augustine says, that evil exists from the fact that humans suffer from a lack of happiness and turn to religion to fill it. If God is the source of all things and yet evil exists, then it seems that either His omnipotence must be sacrificed, so that evil exists in spite of His powers, or He must be seen as the father of evil (a conclusion Nietzsche reaches), meaning His benevolence is undermined. It should be noted that pagan religions do not suffer from the difficulties Augustine faces because they treat the question of evil as a secondary problem. They do not demand that there be an omnipotent and benevolent God, so they are not under the same pressure to account for the existence of evil. This suggests, however, that perhaps the concerns and orientations of these pagans are not as close to Christianity’s as Augustine likes to suggest.
Evil as lack or corruption – Similar to Plato’s “divided line” – the hierarchy of the Good followed by the Forms, mathematical objects, physical beings and simulacra – Augustine establishes a hierarchy of a God who transcends His creation, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, inanimate objects, and so on down to formless matter fading into nothingness. There is no place for evil on Plato’s divided line, because those entities lower down in the order simply had a lesser degree of being, unity, and goodness and evil is not simply a lesser degree of good, but a turning away from goodness. Similarly, there is no room for evil in Augustine’s order of creation. Evil cannot be equated with the nothingness that stands opposite to God, the highest Being, because in that case as one moved down the hierarchy animals would be more evil than men, plants more evil than animals, and so forth. Moreover, since God created the heavens and earth from nothing, if evil were the same as nothingness it would mean that God created the universe from evil. The Manicheans (a Gnostic sect of which Augustine was a member for nine years) decided for this reason that evil was the result of another, evil God. This saved the order established by the good God, but sacrificed His omnipotence. The Manicheans held that the evil God (who corresponded to the vengeful God of the Old Testament) created an evil universe to imprison humanity, while the good God, who came to the world in the form of His son, Jesus, promised to destroy this world and rescue humanity. Since the omnipotence of the good God was sacrificed by Manicheanism, Augustine eventually rejected their ideas. Instead he developed the idea that evil is not a separately existing, positive force rivalling God but is rather a lack or corruption of goodness. In doing this, Augustine establishes a difference between non-being (the negation of being, and all beings being good) and nothingness (the absence of being), defining evil as non-being. The difference between the two is that while the negation or corruption of beings implies the prior existence of beings – just as the existence of a rot within an apple implies the prior existence of the apple, for without it there could be nothing rotten – the absence of being does not imply the prior existence of anything whatsoever. Evil, therefore, can only come into being after the creation of good, because it is the turning away from good. Man sins when he turns from God, disobeying the commandment not to eat from the tree in the Garden of Eden because he aspires to be God-like, refusing to accept his proper place in God’s order. But evil operates on a different plane from