Augustine

« do what one knows one ought not to be doing, mark him off from ethicists of the classical Greek period.

YetAugustine also preserves in his own thinking important strands of ancient Greek thought.

Thus, for example, hisdevelopment of the doctrine of the Christian virtues includes an echo of Plato's idea of the unity of the virtues.

Hisinsistence that 'ought' does not, in any straightforward way, imply 'can', distinguishes him, not only from hiscontemporary Pelagius, whom he helped brand as a Christian heretic, but also from most modern ethicists as well. The philosophy of history Augustine develops in De civitate Dei initiates a branch of philosophy that came into full flower in the nineteenth century.

Also in that same work Augustine makes an influential contribution to what hascome to be called 'just war theory', an applied ethical theory that has continued to develop even into the latterhalf of the twentieth century. 1 Life Augustine was born Aurelius Augustinus, in the North African town of Tagaste (modern Souk Ahras in eastern Algeria), in the Roman Province of Numidia in the waning years of the Roman Empire.

Except for a five-year stay in Italy, he spent his entire life in North Africa.

Ordained a priest in AD 391 and made a bishop four years later, he livedout the remaining thirty-five years of his life, first as a coadjutor and then as the diocesan Bishop of Hippo (later Bône, now Annaba, Algeria), which was at the time the second most important port city in Africa.

Augustine'smother, Monica, was a devout Christian; his father, Patricius, a man of modest means, was not given a Christianbaptism until he was on his death bed.

Augustine received a classical education, first in the local grammar school, then in a higher school in nearby Madaura and finally, under the patronage of a local nobleman named Romanianus,at the university in Carthage.

It was in Carthage as a student of rhetoric that he read Cicero's now lost dialogue,Hortensius , which, as he later wrote in Confessionum libri tredecim (Confessions, more usually known as Confessiones ) altered his sensibility and brought him under the spell of philosophy.

After a brief period as a teacher of rhetoric in his home town, Augustine returned to Carthage and then, in AD 383, sailed for Rome.

The five yearshe spent in Italy included a period as professor of rhetoric at Milan.

Also in Milan, Augustine joined a circle of Neoplatonists and turned away from the Manicheism he had embraced in Carthage.

In Book VII of Confessiones he explains how profoundly the Neoplatonic works he read in that Milanese circle helped him think about the nature ofGod and the problem of evil.

It was also in Milan, after he had immersed himself in Neoplatonism, that Augustine finally became a Christian convert, under the tutelage of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and through the continuinginfluence of his mother, who had followed him to Milan.

The year before his baptism in AD 387 Augustine withdrewwith several philosophically-minded relatives and associates to a villa at Cassiciacum, perhaps near Lake Como,where he wrote four of his earliest works, including an extremely interesting dialogue critical of the scepticism of the New Academy, Contra academicos (Against the Academicians) , as well as the Soliloquia (Soliloquies) .

Shortly after Augustine's baptism, his mother died.

Following a brief stay in Rome, Augustine returned to Carthage in AD 388 andnever left North Africa again.

When he became first a priest and then a bishop, he sought to combine his pastoralduties with extensive excursions into philosophy and theology.

It was in response to the spread of Donatism, Pelagianism and Manicheism in North Africa that Augustine wrote great treatises to expose those trends as heretical(see Manicheism ; Pelagianism ).

It was in further response to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, blamed by critics of Christianity on the Christianization of Rome, that Augustine wrote De civitate Dei .

Rome had already been sacked in AD 410; Hippo itself was under siege as Augustine died twenty years later.

Augustine's literary output,produced with the help of scribes, is enormous.

Chadwick ( 1986 ) claims that what survives of his work is the largest body of writing left by any ancient author.

In addition to approximately one hundred books and treatises there are some two hundred letters and over five hundred sermons.

Three years before his death, Augustine went through allhis works and listed and commented on them in a great compendium, the Retractationes , or reviews.

In some cases he retracts claims made in the works he reviews, or expresses regret at having made them.

However, most of whathe had written he lets stand.

On the basis of these reviews, we may conclude that at least 90 per cent of Augustine's writings have survived.

After Augustine became a priest in AD 391, he wrote no single work that couldbe said to be entirely philosophical.

On the other hand, hardly anything he wrote at any time in his life was entirelydevoid of philosophy.

Philosophical reflections, analyses and explorations turn up, often quite unexpectedly, in his sermons and letters and, of course, in the great theological, exegetical and doctrinal treatises.

By the timeAugustine came to write De civitate Dei , his lingering admiration for the grand ambitions of speculative philosophy and natural theology had become tempered with an acute awareness of how the human mind on its own is toocrippled by old vices to be able to 'enjoy and abide in the changeless light' ( De civitate Dei XI.2 ).

Be that as it may, the philosophical light in his own eye burned brightly until the very end of his long and singularly productive life. 2 Scepticism In Rome at the beginning of his stay in Italy Augustine grew increasingly dissatisfied with Manicheism, to which he had provisionally given his allegiance in Carthage.

He found himself attracted to the sceptical viewpointof the Academics, the followers of Arcesilaus and the New Academy, who 'held that everything was a matter of doubt and asserted that we can know nothing for certain' ( Confessiones V.10.19 ).

Augustine seems to have learned of ancient scepticism, and of the debate between Arcesilaus and the stoic Zeno of Citium from Cicero's Academica (see Cicero ).

Augustine's most extensive discussion of scepticism is to be found in his earliest surviving work, the dialogue Contra academicos , written at Cassiciacum just months before his baptism.

The Academics, according to him, base their claim that nothing can be known on the application of a strict criterion for knowledge put forward byZeno.

Although Augustine formulates Zeno's criterion in several ways and it is difficult to be certain exactly how hewants it to be understood, the point seems to be that, according to this criterion, something can be known just incase it cannot even seem to be false.

Indubitability would then be both necessary and sufficient for knowledge.Against accepting such a criterion, Augustine proposes a dilemma: either the criterion is known to be true, or it isnot.

If it is known to be true, then the sceptics are wrong, since something is known.

If it is not known to be true,then the sceptics have given us no adequate reason to become sceptics.

Augustine is not satisfied, however, withmerely demonstrating the self-defeating character of the Academic position; he goes on to offer sample knowledge. »