Man and God in St. Augustine
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Abstract
Philosophy is conceived al by Augustine as a reflection of man on man. But man by knowing himself, knows God inside his own soul. Augustine emphasizes subjectivity or the self-consciousness principle. And he emphasizes it to the extent of putting God's problem as intrinsic to man himself. That is, God's problem emerges at the very moment man reflects on himself.
Augustine is not mainly concerned on external, physical reality. For him, however, things in themselves are meaningless, they are just "things"; they are experience for the subject of experience that is man. Experience is human contact, it is just human; there is experience there where man is in and only man has got experience because his is a thinking consciousness.
Augustine is the philosopher of interiority. Augustinian interiority is a metaphysical thesis, it is metaphysical, that is, it isn´t a moment of soul, but a moment al Spirit in the objectivity of inner truth. In Augustine there isn´t innatism as the platonic one, that is, "Idea" as something inside one's soul; there is presencialism which is the presence of truth or idea in the spirit. The presence of truth inside human thought gives man no peace: hence his essential unrestlessness. Why such unrestlessness? Because he searches for what he has and has not yet. Ibis presence of truth in himself arouses him and leads him to long for fruition of absolute truth (God).
Does Augustine foster primacy of will over intellect or vice-versa? Augustine is neither an intellectualist, nor a voluntarist for the very simple reason that he doesn´t set neither primacy of will nor primacy or intellect, once they are purely abstract problems. For him every act of spirit is synthetic that is the whole of man intellect and will, is in it.
Truth is conceived of as man´s, inner life as lived by man. There isn´t a viewpoint on truth but there is truth as an objective viewpoint from which every prospective is possible. Truth is the objective viewpoint, inside which one is in and wherefrom one can have every prospective on everything else. Therefore, there isn´t a viewpoint on truth, but truth as the only viewpoint of every standpoint.
Augustine isn´t an ontologist. Augustine doesn´t accept direct intuition from God. Man has no intuition, truth in itself, but partakes of it, he has an ontological link with being and truth. However, there is an abyss or infinite distance, because human Mind partaken truth is different from truth present at the divine Mind.
Augustine allows to free will, that is, freedom of choice between good and evil, between a "lesser good" and a "greater good", between good and evil, between a "lesser ill" and a "greater ill". For him, nevertheless, true freedom isn´t freedom of being able of choosing between good and evil, but freedom one has of choosing but good and good alone.
One can doubt of everything but of oneself w. doubts. Augustine deduces "cogito" from being; Descartes the other way around. One is and is aware of one´s existence, but at the very same moment one is aware of oneself or self-consciousness, one realizes one's consciousness is because there is truth, since there is, inside oneself, the light of truth, in which one discovers one, own existence; that one is aware of oneself.
For Augustine one's soul isn´t inside a body as Plato states; one, soul is incarnated in a body. Body belongs to life of soul and life of soul belongs M body. Man is, therefore, this incarnated unity.
In short: Augustine stress intuition on man´s, intimacy, on God´s presence in one's soul and states that He reveals himself inside man´s, very same soul.
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