Augustine and philosophy
13
May
Augustine of Hippo’s best-known work is Confessions, but his most profound is De Trinitate, written “little by little” and containing his deepest philosophical and theological meditations.
In the preface to the Lusophone edition of Augustine of Hippo’s De Trinitate (digital by LusoSofia.net and Brazilian by Paulinas, 2007) José M. da Silva quotes the philosopher Maurice Blondel, in his Carnets Intimes:
“Nothing is known when it is not loved. (…) For true unity and immanent life to exist, vinculum sub stantiale, the spirit of unity and love must secretly penetrate the intimacy of beings and there operate reality, being. And being is always a presence of God. More than knowledge, more than production, being is love.” (Agostinho, 2007, p. 9)
The preface also reminds us that in the first texts, De Ordine, II, 16, 44, we find the affirmation, which makes Augustine a precursor of negative theology, that “God is best known by ignoring” (de summo illo Deo, qui scitur melius nesciendo). And lest we think that this is just a temporary, one-off assertion, very dependent on Neoplatonic apophaticism (Plotinus and Porphyry), look at the statement embedded in the ‘heart’ of De Trinitate, VIII, 2, 3:
“It is not knowledge of little (paruae notitiae pars) when, from this abyss (of profound this), we aspire to those heights if, before we can know what God is (quid sit deus), we can already know what he is not (possumus iam scire quid non sit). ”
I posting here, By reading Eastern philosophy through Byung-Chul Han, Boethius (reader and translator of Porphyry) also read Augustine in a similar way, following his educational program of “journeying” not on a distant path, but within himself, questioning himself about therapeutic action, in the prison of Pavia, where he wrote “Philosophical Consolations”.
Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) also read it, and they form a scholastic triad from which both a philosophy and a theology can be conceived, an important part of understanding modern epistemology, metaphysics and ontology.
Hannah Arendt did her doctoral thesis on “Love in St. Augustine” (1926) and the influence on her thinking is clear when she develops “The Human Condition” (1958).
Another current influence worth highlighting is Wittgenstein (1889-1951) in his Philosophical Investigations, who recalls a passage from Augustine’s Confessions in which he imagines how he learned language as a child: “If adults named some object and, in doing so, turned towards it, I perceived this and understood that the object had been designated by the sounds they uttered, because they wanted to indicate it” (Wittgenstein 1958, §1).
This passage, as simple as it may seem, denotes the issues of nominalism vs. realism, subject vs. object and, finally, the linguistic turn, a relevant contemporary movement.
For good readers of philosophy, who are unprejudiced and interested in the depth of thought, Augustine of Hippo remains a fundamental and necessary read today.
Agostinho, St. (1988) Confissões, 9a. ed. Trad. J. Oliveira Santos e A. Ambrósio de Pina. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
Agostinho, St. (2008) De trinitate, livros IX e XIII, Tradutores : Arnaldo do Espírito Santo / Domingos Lucas Dias / João Beato / Maria Cristina Castro-Maia de Sousa Pimentel, LusoSofia:press, PT, Covilhã.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations. New York: McMillan. (GEM Ascombe, Trans.).
