When he was a young man soon after reading the Hortensius of Cicreo, which turned him to the search for truth, Augustine accepted the teaching of the Manichaens, which seemed to give to him the truth and was distinct from the Christian doctrine. Christianity maintained that God created the whole world and that God is good. This teaching raised a problem for him: how, then, could Christianity explain the existence of evil and suffering? The Manichaens solved this problem by a dualistic theory, according to which there are two ultimate principles, a good principle, the Light, God or Ormuzd, and an evil principle, the Darkness, Ahriman. These are both eternal and are eternally at war with each other, and this strife is reflected in the world which is the production of these two principle in conflict. In man the soul, composed of light, is the work of the good principle, while the body, composed of grosser matter, is the work of the evil principle. This system commended itself to Augustine because it seemed to solve the problem of evil, and because of its fundamental materialism, light and darkness, because Augustine at that time could not conceive how there could be nonmaterial reality, imperceptible to the senses. Conscious of his own passions and sensual desires, he felt the he could now attribute them to an evil principle outside of his real self. Also Manicheans condemned sexaual intercourse and the eating of meat and prescribed ascetic practices such as fasting, but these practices were obligated only for the elect, not for the "hearers", to which group Augustine belonged.
Shortly before Augustine left for Rome, a noted Manichaean bishop, Faustus by name, came to Carthage, and Augustine asked him to resolve the intellectual difficulties that Augustine was having with Manicheanism, namely, the source of certitude in human thought, the reason why the two principles were in eternal conflict, etc. Although Faustus was agreeable and friendly, Augustine did not find his answers intellectual satisfactory. This shook his faith in Manichaeanism, as he departed for Rome. In Rome he was attracted to the scepticism of the early Academy, though he retained a nominal adherence to Manichaeanism and still accepted some of Manichaean positions, for example, their materialism. In 384 Augustine sought for and obtain a position at Milan as municipal professor of rhetoric. At Milan Augustine read certain "Platonic" treatise in the Latin translation by Victorinus; these treatises were probably the Enneads of Plotinus. The effect of Neoplatonism was to free him from his bondage to materialism and to help him to accept the idea of nonmaterial reality. In addition the Platonic conception of evil as privation, rather than as something real, showed him that the problem of evil could be solved without having recourse to the dualism of the Manichaeans. That is, Neoplationism at this time help Augustine to see the reasonableness of Christianity, and he began to read the New Testament again, particularly the writings of the Apostle Paul. At this time he became acquainted with a group of Neoplatonic Christians which associated with Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan; his sermons on the Scriptures help Augustine to think better of Christianity. Though Augustine was ready to become a catechumen again, his passions were still too strong. Also at this time he met two men, Simplicianus and Pontitianus. Simplicianus, who was an old priest, gave Augustine an account of the conversion of Victorinus, the Neoplatonist, to Christianity, with the result that young Augustine "burned with the desire to do likewise." Pontitianus spoke of the life of St. Anthony of Egypt, which made Augustine disgusted with his moral state. There followed an intense moral struggle which culminated in the famous event that occurred in the garden of his friend's house, where Augustine heard the voice of child over the wall crying repeatedly the refrain "Tolle lege! Tolle lege!" ["Take up and read! Take up and read!"]. Augustine picked up his New Testament and opened it at random and his eyes lighted on the Paul's words in his letter to the Romans 13:13b-14: "not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof." He tells us later, "No further would I read, nor had I any need; instantly, at the end of this sentence, a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away". On Holy Saturday of 387 A.D. at the age of 33 years Augustine was baptized by Bishop Ambrose and then Augustine returned to North Africa in 388 after the death of his mother at Ostia. On his return to Tagaste, he formed a fellowship of "servants of God", who were committed to contemplative philosophy (see True Religion, 389-391 A.D.). He had already started writing against Manichaeism. While visiting Hippo on monastic business, in 391 A.D. at the age of 37 he was ordained a priest. He founded a monastery there, and on succeeding Bishop Valerius in 396 A.D. he was consecrated Bishop of Hippo at the age of 42. He became deeply involved in the usual liturgical, pastoral, disciplinary, administrative, and judicial duties of a bishop. He preached diligently, with long series on the Psalms and the Gospel of John, in a appealing and profound style. He traveled often, around his diocese, to Carthage and elsewhere, especially for synods, consultations, and disputations, but never outside of Africa. He propagated the monastic life and in league with Aurelius of Carthage he rejuvenated African Catholicism. He also wrote extensively against the Manichaeans, the Neo-Platonist, the Donatist and the Pelagains. He died on August 28th, 430 A.D. at the age of 76 years.
Augustine underwent two conversions: an intellectual conversion to Neoplatonism and a moral conversion to Christianity. Although Augustine as a Christian wrote against pagan philosophy, he still showed a strong predilection for Neoplatonism. There is a depreciation of sense-objects in comparison with eternal and immaterial realities; a grudging admission of practical knowledge as a necessity of life; the insistence on "theoretic" contemplation and purification of the soul and liberation from the slavery of the senses. Philosophically this predilection is shown in the Platonic and Neoplatonic view that the objects of the senses, corporeal things, are inferior to the human intellect, which judges them with reference to objective standard as falling short. These standards are the immutable and eternal universal ideas or forms. The standards of goodness and beauty, for example, correspond to Plato's first principles or archai, the exemplary ideas, and the ideal geometrical figures correspond to Plato's mathematicalobjects, ta mathematika, the objects of the dianoia.
To the question, which was asked about the Platonic Ideas, "Where are these ideas?" Augustine answers that they are in the mind, the Nous, of God, they are the thoughts of God. The Neoplatonists made this suggestion and Augustine apparently accepted it as the answer to the question: Where are they? Augustine does not accept the emanation theory of Neoplatonism, where the Nous emanates from the One as the first hypostasis. But Augustine held that the exemplar ideas and eternal, immutable truths are in God. This theory must be accepted, Augustine argues, if one wishes to avoid having to say that God created the world unintelligently. Thus creation is like Plato's formation of the sense-world by the divine artisan, the demiurge, except that there is no pre-existent matter; God created it out of nothing. Thus the world of creatures reflects and manifests God, even if it does in a very inadequate way. The order and unity of creatures, their positive reality, reveals the goodness of God and the order and stability of the universe manifest the wisdom of God.
But God, as the self-existent, eternal and immutable Being, is infinite and, as infinite, is incomprehensible. God is His own Perfection and is "simple", without parts, so that His wisdom and knowledge, His goodness and power, are His own essence, which is without accidents. God, therefore, transcends space in virtue of His spiritually and simplicity, as He transcends time in virtue of His eternity. "...He is above all things. So too He is in no interval or extension in time, but in His immutable eternity is older than all things because He is before all things and younger than all things because He is after all things." From all eternity God knew all things, which He was to make. He does not know them, because He has made them, but rather the other way around. God first knew the things of creation though they came into being in time. The species of created things have their ideas or rationes seminales in the things themselves and also in the Divine Mind as rationes aeternae. God from all eternity saw in Himself, as possible reflections of Himself, the things that He could create and would create. He knew them before creation as they are in Him, as Exemplars, but He made them as they exist, that is, as external and finite reflections of His divine essence. Since God did nothing without knowledge, He foresaw all that He would make, but His knowledge is not distinct acts of knowledge, but "one eternal, immutable and ineffable vision". In virtue of this eternal act of knowledge, of vision, to which nothing is past or future, that God sees, "foresees", even the free acts of men, knowing them "beforehand". This exemplarist doctrine passed into the Middle Ages and was taken as characteristic of Augustinianism.
But Augustine rejected the Neoplatonic belief in the divine origin of the human soul. To this he was most strongly opposed; man is not a disguised divinity. He was most concerned to keep clear the distinction between God as Creator and man as His creature. God is God and man is man. Augustine was always conscious of the distance between them. He expressly rejects - despite his attraction to Neoplatonism - the interpretation of the Old Testament Creation story of man that God breathed into man a part of His own Divine Spirit. The spirit of life which God breathed into man was not God's own Spirit, but was a created spirit. Augustine did not recognise any original identity between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man.
In the seventh book of his Confessions, Augustine describes what he found and what he did not find in Neoplatonism. He found God and the eternal world, and he was fired with eros for the Divine. Neoplatonism had showed him the object for his love and longing, but not the way to gain it. Between God and man is a vast gulf that man can not bridge. By eros man is bound to the One but he can not reach it. The yearning is not strong enough to lift man up to the Eternal. Augustine had no doubt that eros is the way to God, but he began to doubt that we, as we are, are able to gain access to God this way. If we are to find God, God Himself must come down to us; but Neoplatonism knew nothing about this. Of God and His nature, and of man's yearning for Him, even of the Word (logos) that is with God from the beginning, he could read in the writings of the Neoplatonists. "But of the Word become flesh, and dwelt among us, I read not there," Augustine writes. The writings of Neoplatonist tell us nothing about the Son of God, who emptied Himself and took the form of a servant, humbling Himself and became obedient unto death; they do not tell us that God spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all. In Neoplatonism Augustine finds human love (eros) which tries to climb up to heaven, but in Neoplatonism he finds nothing of God's love (agape) which descends, and without which eros cannot attain to God.
But Augustine does not see that Christain Agape is the direct opposite of the Neoplatonic Eros. He seeks a compromise that will unite them, but when he finds that compromise, Eros will be the basis of that compromise. Agape will be added as new element which will aid and help Eros to obtain its desired object. Agape is fitted into the framework of Eros. Agape is the necessary addition, without which Eros cannot reach its goal. Thus Augustine understands God's love as Caritas, grace that makes it possible for Eros to obtain its desired goal. In Augustine's thinking all love is acquisitive love. To love means to direct one's longing and desire to an object by the possession of which one obtains happiness. For him love is desire for the Good and only that which is a "bonum," can be loved. Why? Because only this can exercise upon the soul that power of attraction which is essential to love. To love is to seek one's good in the beloved object. And the object can only be loved if it can be conceived as including this good in itself. It is not enough that it should be a "bonum" in general, but it must be a "bonum" for me who is the lover. Since love means seeking the satisfaction of my own need, then I can only love my "bonum." Augustine believed that desire, acquistive love, is the basis of human life. This is true of the righteous as of the sinner. Desire is the mark of being a creature; but it is grounded in God's being. God alone is the Immortal who has life in Himself; therefore He needs nothing outside Himself. God has His "bonum" in Himself, and that is why there cannot be found in Him any need or desire. He is Absolute Being and as such is the Highest Good. There does not exist anything that is good which He does not already posses; God is totally self-sufficient and without any longing and desire.
Created life is quite different; it does not have its "bonum" in itself; its existence depends entirely on something which outside itself. As a creature, it does not possess its "bonum," but must seek it, and this it does through love; that is, through the desire that is set upon the acquisition of this good. If man ceased to desire, it would mean that man possesses his "bonum" in himself and no longer needs to seek it outside himself; he would be God, which he is not. This acquisitive love is neither good or bad; to desire is simply to be human and is an expression of the fact that man is a temporal being, belonging to the sphere of created beings. The distinction between good and evil, which is the distinction between a right and a wrong love, occurs with respect to question of the object of the love. That love is right which sets its desire upon a good object, that is, on an object which really can satisfy man's needs; that love is wrong which is directed to a wrong object, that is, to an object which is unable, or only apparently able, to satisfy his needs. Upon what objects can love be set? Augustine answers that there are ultimately only two possibilities: "All love either ascends or descends." ["Omnis amor aut ascendit aut descendit."] Love is directed either upwards toward God, the Creator, or downwards towards created things. This gives Augustine his fundamental distinction between Caritas and Cupiditas. Caritas is love directed upwards toward God and Cupiditas is love directed downward toward the world. Caritas is love of God, Cupiditas is love of the world. Caritas is love for the eternal, Cupiditas is love for the temporal. The reason that human love can take these contrary directions is that man is by nature both a spiritual and a fleshly being. Man's spirit seeks the Creator and his body seeks the lower creation. His spirit seeks to fly away up to the Eternal and find happiness there, but his bodily and fleshly nature binds him by its weight to the earthly and temporal and prevents his flight. The difference between Caritas and Cupiditas is not one of kind, but of object. In kind, Caritas and Cupiditas, love of God and love of the world, is love of desire and longing, whether it directed toward God and the Eternal, or toward the created and temporal. For Augustine love is a longing whose quality is determined by the object to which is directed. "Love, but see to it what you love. Love to God and love to neighbor is called Caritas; love of the world and love of temporal things is called Cupiditas." We must be converted from the false Cupiditas love, but the conversion (conversio) consists simply in turning love's desire from the lower to the higher object.
Augustine was faced with a difficult problem. In Caritas man wants to ascend to the Creator in order to possess his highest good. But the greater the distance between the Creator and man, His creature, the more difficult is the ascent of Caritas. Has man any power to raise himself up to God, or is he doomed as a created being to set his love on the created things around him? In the struggle between Caritas and Cupiditas, is Cupiditas bound to win? Can man realy achieve such a Caritas (love of God) as the great and first commandment of love requires?
Augustine had occasion to think on this problem, especially in
connection with his controversy with Pelagianism. Pelagius represented
the moralistic view of Christianity that asserted that man could
achieve such a love of God without any divine aid. Pelegius does
not deny man's need for Divine grace, but he reduces it to the
following three points:
(1) grace was given at creation when God
gave man a free will, in virtue of which man is able choose the
good as well as evil.
(2) In addition, God graciously made man's
choice easier by showing him, in His law and above all in the
example of Christ, the good which he has to choose. And
(3) if man uses his freedom to choose evil, God's grace is
shown in that He will forgive the sin, thus making it possible
for man's free will to begin afresh without being burdened
with the past sins.
Augustine attacked this Pelagian concept of grace most vigorously.
He argued that a "grace" which includes just these
three elements - freedom of the will, the law and example of Christ,
and the forgiveness of sins - is just not enough to help us.
(1) How can this freedom of the will help man who is surrounded
by a sense world with all its allurements, which drag our desire
downwards and bind us to transient things by means of the pleasure
they arouse? And
(2) what use is it that we learn in the law
and the example of Christ that our desires ought to be directed
upward to heavenly things, when these in their remote transcendence
leave us cold and unmoved? And
(3) what use is it that God in His grace and mercy forgives us
the sins we have committed in the past, if in our future activity
we have only the resources of free will, which is inadequate
to free our desires for lower things and redirect them to the heavenly?
If grace is to have value for us, it must be a power intervening
in our actual life, being effectual here and now. Augustine does not
think that Pelagius' "deistic" grace is real grace.
It is only means that God ordered at the beginning that we should
fend for ourselves. Augustine puts in its place an effective grace,
a grace that provides to change our desires and redirected them toward God.
It is not that free will and the law are being rejected, but
they are not enough. Free will and law are necessary, since without
them free will would be impossible to choose between good and
evil not knowing them through the law. Thus Augustine reserves
the word "gratia" for the Divine intervention
which is necessary over and above them. What is necessary is
that the will should really be won to the supernatural good.
This cannot be brought about by any legal command, but only by
a new desire driving out the old, by Caritas overcoming Cupiditas.
How are we to gain possession of this Caritas, which is the "fulfilling
of the law" and the root from which all good grows? Pelagius
affirms that man himself can produce Caritas in himself; Augustine
denies that. "He who asserts that we can possess God's Caritas
without God's aid, what else does he assert than that we can possess
God without God?" If man had originally been a divine being,
we could have spoken of a natural upward atttraction dwelling
in him even as he is now; but Augustine rejects this Platonic
idea and holds that man is a created being who as such belongs
to the rest of creation. Further, by the Fall man has cut himself
off from God and sunk down into transient things; and so naturally
he seeks his "bonom" in the temporal things about
himself. Since the fall there has dwelt in man's nature a downward
attraction, and he cannot direct his longing to the eternal.
He does not possess any Caritas in himself, and if he is to gain
it, it must be given to him by a special Divine act of grace,
it must be infused into his heart from without.
How did Augustine suppose this infusion of Caritas to take place? He explained it in the following manner. As a creature, man must seek his "bonum" outside himself, either in the higher or lower world. The higher world can offer an eternal and infinite bonum; the bonum of the lower world, on the other hand, is transient, but it lies close at hand and within easiest reach. It pushes his desire in its direction by its close proximity and captivates man by the pleasures it arouses in him, and by comparison the heavenly good seems so remote and unreal so that it can take no firm hold on man's soul. By His law God has bond man to the supernatural good and commanded him to set his desires upon it in Caritas; but this is merely external bond, not to be compared to the inward bond of desire by which the things of the world holds man captive to themselves. The reason the eternal cannot seriously compete with the temporal is because its attraction does reach to man. Temporal things being so near to man ceaselessly attract and allure him. If the eternal is to gain such power over man, then it must come near to him, so near that its power of attraction becomes greater and more irresistable than that which comes from temporal things. And this is just what happened in the Incarnation. It bridged the gulf separating man from his Creator. God, our eternal bonum, is no longer far from us; in Christ He has come so near to us that the every temporal must pale in comparison. This revelation of God in Christ is the power that attracts us. When God gives Himself to us in Christ, He gives us at once the object we are to love and the Caritas with which to love it. The object we are to love is Himself, but Caritas is also Himself, who by the Holy Spirit takes up His abode in our hearts. The fact that we love God is itself entirely a gift of God.
At this point Augustine appears to be as far as possible from the Platonic theory, from which he started. But this is not so; if God had not come down to us in His gratia, we could never ascended to Him in Caritas. This is why grace is so important to Augustine; without grace there is no access to God. Without grace, Caritas has no air beneath its wings for its flight to God. Without the grace that precedes, the ascent of Caritas can not be accomplished. But all that Augustine says about the Way of salvation is based on the scheme of ascent to the supreme good. Grace has simply been introduced as the indispensible means of this ascent. What the law and free will combined could not do, since our pleasure is found in earthly things, is done by God's grace coming to meet man with the eternal and supernatural bonum and awakens in him a longing for it. Grace does not annul the law, but it gives what the law requires. Unlike the law, it does not merely command the good; it awakens in the soul delight in the good. Grace does not destroy free will, but simply gives it a new object and a new direction and purpose. "The Grace of God makes a willing man out of a unwilling one." Caritas, which is the fulfilling of the law and the root of all good, is not part of our natural endowment, nor is it something that we can acquire or merit. It must be given to us from outside us by God as unmerited grace; it must be infused in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. This unmerited grace enables us earn and merit eternal life with God.
These ideas made Augustine the founder of the Roman Catholic doctrine of grace. His combination of Gratia and Caritas, God's descent and our ascent, created a synthesis between the New Testament and the Neoplatonic Way of salvation, which dominated the Mediaeval church. Although at many point the Catholic Church has rejected Augustine's idea of grace, the basic idea of grace as "infused love" which makes our ascent to God possible, it has remained faithful to the way that Augustine began.
Even though Augustine most emphatically asserts the Divine descent in speaking of grace and the Incarnation, he has not left behind the scheme of ascent. Grace and the Incarnation are simply the necessary means for it. The descent of Christ has as it purpose and goal our ascent to God; God became man so that we might become gods. This can be shown by how little grace counteracts the eros tendency. Since grace is the same as infusio caritas, grace itself can be described as a ladder on which we may mount up to the Divine life and make our way to Heaven. In other words there is no real change in Augustine's view; our love for God is the necessary condition for fellowship with God, but we cannot have this without the help of God's love. The descent of God in Christ to lost humanity is not motivated by the need for a real change in man but only to enable him to accomplish his ascension to God. The revelation of God in Christ is an end itself, the revelation of God's love for man, and not just the means to an end; man's love for God.