St Augustine: Faith
Versus Reason
Kirk Straughen
(Investigator 140, 2011
September)
In Investigator
136 page 48 I made reference to St Augustine and, in a brief manner,
mentioned his influence on my ideas relating to the nature of faith.
Having thought about things 1 have decided to develop this statement
into an article.
I will
not go into any
great details concerning St Augustine's life except to say that he was
strongly influenced by the Greek philosopher, Plato, whose ideas he
adapted and used in defence of Christianity.
It is
important to keep
in mind that although St Augustine was a philosopher, first and
foremost he was a theologian, and as a consequence all truth for him is
ultimately derived from God:
There
can
only be reasoning from faith. Only from the rightly oriented will, the
mind already turned toward the redeeming God, can man discover Truth.
The keystone of Augustinianism is this — "I believe in order to
understand," or even better, theology is "faith seeking understanding."
(1)
For St Augustine,
Ultimate Truth must depend on something more reliable than the fallible
human mind, and for him the solution to the problem is found in his
Doctrine of Illumination, which may be summarised as follows:
The
doctrine
of illumination [is], the thesis that God plays an active role in human
cognition by somehow illuminating the individual's mind so that it can
perceive the intelligible realities which God simultaneously presents
to it. (2)
Considering St
Augustine
was a Neo-Platonist in his philosophic outlook (Neo-Platonism is,
broadly speaking, the idea that reality is ultimately derived from a
transcendental power) it is not surprising that he reached the
conclusions that he did.
Of
course St Augustine,
being a learned man, wished to reconcile Christianity as much as
possible with reason as exemplified by classical philosophy, and he
attempted to do so in the following way:
St
Augustine
ruled out a priori any real contradiction between the data of
revelation, true by definition in the light of their source, and the
equally true data of observation and conclusions of true reasoning.
When there was an apparent contradiction, this must arise from our
misunderstanding of the true meaning of the conflicting statements, and
those, he said, may not be the literal meanings, whether in Scripture
or in science. (3)
This view is set
out in
his De Genesi ad Litteram (Latin for "The Literal Meaning of
Genesis"). Although St Augustine was all for using reason to confirm
Scripture, in the final analysis faith must come first, for in chapter
21 of De Genesi ad Litteram he makes it clear that any teaching
contrary to revelation is to be rejected as false:
But
when they
[the philosophers] produce from any of their books a theory contrary to
Scripture, and therefore contrary to the Catholic faith, either we
shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or
at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt.
And we will so cling to our Mediator, "in whom are hidden all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge." (4)
Ultimately, an
appeal is
made to authority — the Catholic faith — rather than facts derived from
observation and experiment. St Augustine's philosophical and
theological speculations had a profound influence on Western thought up
until the final stages of the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages:
St
Augustine,
although not strictly a Scholastic, nevertheless as early as the fifth
century showed the trend of this belief [of the primacy of faith]...
This conception marks Scholastic development at its peak. But such a
situation could not last long. Later we find the doctrine of the
twofold truth; according to this, reason and faith occupy positions of
equality. When you engage in theological thought, faith necessarily is
the guiding principle; on the other hand, in all scientific and secular
activities, reason is the only principle to follow. The artificiality
of such a theory shows its weakness. As a result, in the final stages
of Scholasticism, reason was considered as superior to faith. (5)
St Augustine's
Doctrine
of Illumination has partially shaped my own views concerning religious
faith verses reason as exemplified by science. It seems to me that the
essence of religion is the idea of transcendence — that there exists
something external to nature which is the ultimate source of reality
(call this God if you so choose).
If there
is such a thing,
and this thing wishes to interact with material intelligences, then it
seems to me the only way it might be able to do so is through the
medium of the mind (for the sake of argument I will speculate that mind
is immaterial, and that interaction might be possible between humans
and God if the mind can form a bridge between disparate modes of being)
— God being immaterial and
transcendental may not be able to have any direct interaction with
material objects.
If this
is so, then in my
opinion faith is best based on the subjective experience of the divine
through mysticism rather than empirical evidence for three reasons, of
which the first has already been mentioned. The second reason is that
science (which looks for natural explanations) cannot prove the
supernatural as it resides outside the province of Nature; and thirdly,
the provisional nature of science negates all attempts to derive
statements of ultimate truth from its theorems.
Indeed,
the only
instances where science can investigate the supernatural is when it is
claimed that the supernatural has had some effect upon the natural
world which, of course, includes religious experiences that occur in
physical brains.
In any
event, an
examination of significant religious figures such as the Buddha, St
Paul and Mohammed reveals that religious or mystical experiences — the
antithesis of empiricism — played a major role in
developing
their faith rather than scientific proof. The way I see it: each
person's religion is a 'truth' unto themselves that is best validated
by the personal experience of whatever God or gods they believe in.
As for
myself: I prefer
the provisional nature of science, and can happily live with the
uncertainty of human knowledge. In the end all we can do is speak in
terms of probability based on what is currently known, and what is
currently known indicates that the existence of nature is more probable
than the existence of the supernatural.
Bibliography:
1
Magill, F. (Ed) page
259 in Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form, publisher not
listed in English, 1969
2
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#PsyEpi
3 Crombie, A.C. page 59 in Augustine to Galileo, Mercury Books, London,
1964
4
http://college.holycross.edu/faculty/alaffey/other_files/Augustin
e-Genesisl.pdf
5
Alphern, H. page 7 to 8
in An outline History of Philosophy, Forum House, London, 1969
Further Reading
Some of
St Augustine's
most influential works such as Confessions and The City of
God can be found at:
www.ccel.org/cce1/augustine?show=worksBy