African Philosophy for an African Dinner:
St. Augustine on the True, the Good and the Beautiful

Who’s the greatest theologian, and possibly the greatest philosopher, in the history of the Church? Don’t say St. Thomas! Who’s the guy who taught St. Thomas everything he knew? Well, almost…. St. Augustine! And where was St. Augustine from? That’s right: Africa – specifically, what is today Algeria, at its northernmost, right on the southern coast of the Mediterranean. His episcopal see was Hippo Regius: modern-day Annaba, Algeria. If you head east from the Atlantic Ocean (from the Strait of Gibraltar, with Spain to the north, Morocco to the south), this is about a fourth of the way to the Holy Land. It’s also only a little over 400 miles from there to Rome, to the northeast, across the Tyrrhenian Sea. 

So tonight, what say we dip our minds into African philosophy, by way of sampling – tasting – a small handful (maybe even spoonful) of the tiniest, daintiest bite-size morsels of the thought of St. Augustine? Are you game? Part talk, part discussion: Let me propose a few ideas, based essentially – I hope! – on Augustine’s own thought, and along the way we might discuss those ideas – no pressure! – as well as thinking through a couple of little passages together. What do you think?

Ok! And just to keep it real – by which I mean, connected, somehow, with Gregory the Great Academy – what did Augustine have to say about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful?

St. Augustine on the Good 

What is “the good”? 

How do you know something is “good”? What does it mean to think or perceive something to be good?

Here are two of the most famous and extraordinary sayings of St. Augustine:

“… you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Conf., Bk. 1 [1, i]).

AND “What was there to bring me delight except to love and be loved?” (Conf., Bk. 2 [2,ii]).

Aren’t these both statements – really basic statements – about the good? 

We only really love the good, or at least, what we perceive to be good. And if we are loved, we are good for those who love us, or at least perceived by them as good. Augustine says, “What more is there to live for than this?” To be a loved lover, or a good, loving the good.

And what do we really rest in but that which we love, and which, now having in our possession, makes us happy? We rest in the Good, when we come into possession of it, and maybe, come into its possession.

At the end of Book 1 of Confessions, Augustine praises and thanks God, passionately, for the many goods that he knows make up his life: existence, life, feeling, self-love (!), memory, learning, friendship, happiness, cheerfulness, knowledge – all “gifts of my God.” “These things are good,” Augustine says, “and they all made up my being. Therefore, he who made me is good, and he is my good” (1, xx). And yet all these other goods – those that are not-God – creatures, created by the only pure and absolute Good, God Himself – must in the end, for Augustine, be recognized as relative goods, dependent upon their Creator, the Good Itself (Himself) for their very existence, and so for their lovableness, which is, of course, their goodness [as an effect always has all that it is from its cause – says Aristotle!]. 

But this relative quality of all created goods leads Augustine gradually to his realization as well of the basis, within the created order, of the possibility of evil and sin. Immediately in the wake of his praise of God’s goodness at the end of Bk. 1, he continues: “But in this was my sin, that not in him but in his creatures, in myself and others, did I seek pleasure, honors, and truths” (1, xx). And in Bk. 2 he makes plain that “this world, from the unseen wine of its own perverse will, tend[s] down towards lower things, forgets you, its creator, and loves your creature more than yourself” (2, iii; my emphases). Notice that Augustine says lower things, not bad things! All creatures are good – and so, truly lovable. But they are lesser goods, never to be preferred to the perfect Good, God Himself. Notice also that Augustine says we “forget”!! Isn’t this a striking description of the basis of sin? What do you think?

St. Augustine on the True 

Did you know St. Augustine had a son? His name was Adeodatus. He converted at the same time as Augustine and died shortly after that, at the age probably of about sixteen. One of Augustine’s brilliant shorter works is called De Magistro – On the Teacher – which he composed as a recorded dialogue between himself and his son. The dialogue is all about truth. Here’s a little snippet from the work:

“The utmost value I can attribute to words is this. They bid us look for things, but they do not show them to us so that we may know them. He alone teaches me anything who sets before my eyes, or one of my other bodily senses, or my mind, the things which I desire to know. From words we can learn only words….” !!! He goes on: “Knowledge of words is completed by knowledge of things, and by the hearing of words not even words are learned…” (xi, 36). 

But then he goes on again: “Concerning universals of which we can have knowledge, we do not listen to anyone speaking and making sounds outside ourselves. We listen to Truth which presides over our minds within us, though of course we may be bidden to listen by someone else using words. Our real Teacher is he who is so listened to, who is said to dwell in the inner man, namely Christ, that is, the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God. To this wisdom every rational soul gives heed, but to each is given only so much as he is able to receive, according to his own good or evil will. If anyone is ever deceived it is not the fault of Truth, any more than it is the fault of the common light of day that the bodily eyes are often deceived” (xi, 38). According to Augustine, then, the Truth is, when all is said and done…? Christ: plain and simple!! And yet, the truth also is all about things – much more than it is about words. Christ is the Truth itself, who has – who indeed is – the knowledge of things, and these he tells us, if we open our ears, and minds, to listen.

With this in mind, listen to this passage from Bk. 1 of Confessions, in which Augustine describes infancy – his own and that of others he has observed: 

For at that time I knew how to seek the breast, to be satisfied with pleasant things, and to cry at my bodily hurts, but nothing more. // Later on, I began to laugh, at first when asleep and then when awake. This has been told to me concerning myself, and I believe it, since we see other infants acting thus, although I do not remember such acts of my own. Then little by little I perceived where I was, and I wished to make my wants known to those who could satisfy them. Yet I could not do so, because the wants were within me, while those outside could by no sensible means penetrate into my soul. So I tossed my limbs about and uttered sounds, thus making such few signs similar to my wishes as I could, and in such fashion as I could, although they were not like the truth… (1, vi).

Why, or how, are baby Augustine’s bodily movements – signs, he calls them – not “like the truth”? 

Is it not that he is not able to provide adequate names for the things he desires? Later, in Bk. 3 (3, vi), Augustine will argue that the more real something is – we might say, the more  thing-ness it has – the more knowable it is – which is as much as to say, the more true it is. The most real thing there is – the thingy-est thing – is God, and so God is the Truest of all true things: Truth itself. Christ, then, is Truth incarnate, embodied: now and forever onward, not only pure Spirit, but physically indwelling Spirit; we might consider then that the most knowable of all beings, God Himself, in uniting himself not only to an immaterial human soul but also to a material human body, infinitely increases the degree to which we can know the material, physical world: Christ’s humanity is true, including his body, and our own bodies are true, as much as are our souls, though the former in a mode of knowability sub-ordered to the latter. 

Phew! We’re getting a little abstract here, aren’t we? Last quick but intriguing point: In his ranking of degrees of reality on the basis of degrees of true-ness, Augustine ties reality also to life: it seems that the more alive something is – the more life a thing has – the more real, and so the more true, the thing is. God is Life itself: the most alive thing there is, the most real thing that lives. All else that lives lives through and because of God, and so the truth of all created things depends entirely upon its participation in the one Truth, Life Itself, the Living God, in which all creatures live and move and have their being.

St. Augustine on the Beautiful 

What is beauty? Aquinas says it’s “that which being seen pleases,” but he pretty clearly extends the notion to include the purely conceptual realm – so we might say “that which being seen, whether by the body’s or the mind’s eye, pleases.” But what does this mean? Beauty is everywhere in St. Augustine’s writing and thought – often in the very same contexts in which he is talking also about the Good, or the True, or both. The last passage I want to read and talk about is another famous one from later in the Confessions – from Bk. 10, after Augustine’s dramatic conversion in Bk. 8, after his baptism and tabling of his dazzling worldly career in Bk. 9. Now Augustine waxes even more philosophical than ever before (if you can believe it!), but suddenly, in chapter 27, in the wake of a long and difficult reflection on memory, he breaks out in the following ecstatic-anguished prayer – Let’s see what you think about these exquisite lines – some of Augustine’s finest:

Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you! Behold, you were within me, while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and, a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you. They kept me far from you, those fair things which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all. You have called to me, and have cried out, and have shattered my deafness. You have blazed forth with light, and have shone upon me, and you have put my blindness to flight! You have sent forth fragrance, and I have drawn in my breath, and I pant after you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace (10, xxvii).

[Note: I suspect that this splendid passage may be the original basis for the whole medieval tradition of the so-called “spiritual senses”: a way of mapping onto the mind’s eye (the soul, the intellect) the sensual imagination, to give us new ways to think and talk about our experience of God in the language of bodily sensory impression.]

Do we hear Augustine invoking “the good” here? E.g.: Late have I loved you: remember, we love the good; and Augustine’s responses to God’s self-revelations in the last few lines – drawing in breath, panting, hungering, burning – are these not the most loving, passionate expressions of desire for the good? And “the true”? Well, we have at least the truth of the real, beautiful things God has made, not to mention the truth – the true-ness – of God Himself: how could the thing a man addresses with so much passionate intelligence and intelligent passion not be true? “O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, too late have I loved you!” How could this One not be really and truly alive? Or maybe St. Augustine is just delusional….

But what does Augustine say here about beauty – about the beauty of creatures, in comparison, and relation, to the beauty of God: to Beauty itself? Are creatures beautiful (do they please us when looked upon or thought about?)? Well, yes: Augustine says while looking for God, earnestly but in the wrong place – outside, not inside himself – he “rushed headlong,” as if perhaps to devour? upon the beautiful things around him, and these things kept him far away from God! Creatures are, and are beautiful, only because they were created by God – Perfect, Infinite Beauty. But does Augustine say in the end that these creatures with all their beauty can only be distractions, or worse, obstacles, walls, chains, keeping us away from their maker?

What are we to make of the relative goodness, the relative truth, the relative beauty – indeed, the relative life – of created things in Augustine’s estimation, in the blinding light of the One pure and perfect Good, Truth itself, Beauty itself, Life itself? Must we set entirely aside, now, in this earthly life, what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “all this juice and all this joy,” in order to come close to God? Surely beautiful things might lead us to God – precisely by their beauty! Is Augustine wrong?