In the year 313 C.E. an important event occurred. The Roman emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, and even though only one in ten citizens of the Empire was a
Christian, Christianity became the official religion of the realm. During the next couple of centuries, the early Church fathers turned to the prevailing Neoplatonic philosophical tradition in their search for intellectual foundations for their still relatively new religion. The first truly important philosopher in this Chris- tian Platonic tradition was Augustine of Hippo
(354–430). He had one foot squarely planted in the
classical world and one in the medieval world, and he straddled the abyss that separated these two worlds.
As a young student of rhetoric in Rome, acutely aware of his own sensual nature, Augustine was concerned with the problem of good and evil. He became attracted to Manicheanism (founded by Mani of Persia in the third century), which was a philosophy that com- bined certain Christian and Persian elements and that understood reality in terms of an eternal struggle between the principle of light (Good) and the principle of darkness (Evil). The strife between these two principles manifested itself as the world. The soul represented the good and the body represented evil. As a Manichee, Augustine could attribute his many sins to a principle somehow outside himself.
But Augustine soon became dissatisfied with this “solution” to the problem of evil, and he became attracted to Neoplatonism and
its conception of an immaterial reality. It was from Neoplatonism that Augustine got his idea of evil not as a real feature of reality, but as a lack, an incomplete-
ness, a privation. (Recall the Simile of the Line: the more goodness a thing has, the more real it is. Conversely, the less reality it has, the worse it is. Just as a dental cavity is a lack of calcium [a hole is not a thing, it is an absence of being], so is a sin not a thing, but an absence of goodness.) In 388, after a minor mystical experience,
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The devil made me do it!
Woe is me. I’m a sinkhole of nothingness.
Augustine converted to Christianity and never again vacillated in his intellectual commitment. Though Augustine returned to the religion of his mother (she was eventually designated by the Catholic Church as a saint, Saint Monica), his understanding of Christianity remained influenced by Neoplatonic ideas. But he would now admit that sin was not simply a privation of goodness, but the result of excessive self- love on the part of the sinner and the lack of sufficient love for God. In 391 Augustine was ordained a priest and in 396 became the Bishop of Hippo, on the North African coast. During this period, Christianity was still seeking to achieve focus on its own identity, and Augustine spent an enormous amount of energy combating a series of heresies: Donatism, Priscillianism, Arianism, and of course, his former persuasion, Manicheanism. But at the same time, he had to combat a new and especially difficult heresy, that of Pelagianism. Pelagius’s heresy was that of overaccentuating the role of free will in salvation and minimizing the role of God’s grace. Much to Augustine’s embarrassment, Pelagius had been using Augustine’s book on free will to defend his own view.
So Augustine found himself walking a tightrope. He had to at- tack the Manichees for minimizing free will and attack the Pelagians for overemphasizing it. This problem occupied him in some very subtle philosophical reasoning.
The problem: If God is all-wise (omniscient), then he knows the future. If he knows the future, then the future must unfold exactly in accordance with his knowledge (otherwise, he does not know the future). If the events in the future must occur according to God’s foreknowledge of them, then they are necessary, and there is no free- dom. If there is no freedom, then humans are not responsible for their acts, in which case it would be immoral to punish people for their sins. (If God knew millions of years before Judas was born that he would betray Jesus, how could God send Judas to hell for his betrayal?) So the conclusion seems to be: Either God is omniscient but immoral, or he is benevolent but ignorant. How can Augustine avoid this unpalat- able dilemma? He does so with a number of sophisticated arguments.
One is that, for God, there is no past or future, only an eternal pres- ent. For him, everything exists in an eternal moment. To say “God knew millions of years before Judas’s birth that he would betray Jesus” is to make the human error of believing that God is in time. In fact, God is outside of time. (That’s what it means to say that God is eternal.) Another tack of Augustine’s is to admit that God’s knowledge of the world entails necessity, but to deny that necessity
is incompatible with freedom. Like the stoics, Augustine believed that freedom is the capacity to do what one wants, and one can do what one wants even if God (or anyone else) already knows what that person wants. Augus- tine pointed out that God’s fore- knowledge of a decision doesn’t cause the decision, any more than my own acts are caused by my knowledge of what I’m going to do.
I have just presented a sample of Augustinian thought. His philosophy is a profound meditation on the relation between
God and the human being. It was addressed to a troubled and expir- ing world. The old order was crumbling. In
fact, on the same day Augustine suc- cumbed to the infirmities of old age
in the cathedral at Hippo, the bar- baric Vandals were burning the
city. Even though they left the cathedral standing out of respect for him, the fires that consumed Hippo were the same ones that consumed the Roman Empire. The classi- cal period was over, and that long night, which some call the
Dark Ages, had commenced. At the death of Augus- tine, Western philosophy fell into a state of deterioration that was to last for 400