A distinguished Augustine scholar, Goulven Madec, has said, “The history of patristic philosophy has only a precarious status. It lacks a principal object; for there is no ‘patristic philosophy.’” He immediately adds, “and the Fathers of the Church are not ‘philosophers’ in the commonly accepted sense.”¹ Certainly, he is correct in maintaining that the Fathers of the Church are not philosophers in the sense commonly accepted today. However, it is not nearly so clear that the Fathers of the Church were in no sense philosophers or that there is no philosophy to be found in the Fathers of the Church....

The heart of book 2 of lib. arb. aims to show “how it is manifest that God is.”¹ All the commentaries that I have been able to consult speak of this section as a proof for the existence of God or even as the Augustinian proof for the existence of God, though they differ considerably in their assessment of the success of the proof.² Yet “how it is manifest that God exists” seems a strange way to refer to a conclusion arrived at by mediate reasoning many pages long. And the conclusion that “God is and truly is” suggests that...

In this article I want to propose a hypothesis about what Augustine meant when he spoke of the “spirituals” as opposed to “the animal or carnal men” in the Church and in speaking of the “spiritual” interpretation of Scripture. I shall offer some evidence that the hypothesis is correct, though within the limits of a short article I obviously cannot prove its correctness. Nonetheless, I believe that sufficient evidence can be mustered to render the hypothesis a highly plausible one.

Perhaps the best way for me to approach the statement of the hypothesis will be to sketch what has led...

In his retr. Augustine tells us, “Whoever reads my works in the order in which they were written will perhaps discover how I made progress in writing” (Prologue, 3). Such a statement obviously implies that there is progress and development in what he has written. This article will explore but one way in which Augustine made progress, namely, in his understanding of the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. To be even more specific, it will deal with the object of love of neighbor, when one loves his neighbor as one ought.¹ In doing so, it will cast light...

In conf. 4, 16, 28–19, Augustine reports that he read and understood on his own Aristotle’s Categories when he was only twenty. He says that he then thought that everything that existed “had to be included under these ten predicaments,” but that his attempt to understand God by them was a hindrance rather than a help. For at that time he thought that God was subject to his greatness and beauty in such wise that they were in God as in a subject, just as they are in bodies. However, by the time of Trin., Augustine makes extensive use...

In Trin. 5 Saint Augustine begins to speak of God in terms of the Aristotelian categories or predicaments.¹ In another article I tried to show why Augustine claims that nothing is said of God according to accident and how he distinguishes between relative and nonrelative predication about God.² In that article I deliberately avoided dealing with Augustine’s further claim that God is substance or essence. In the present article what I wish to do is to examine Augustine’s use of substantia or essentia with regard to God. His use of these terms falls into three expressions or three sets of...

The immutability of God has in recent years come under discussion for a number of reasons. It has seemed to some that an immutable God cannot be genuinely concerned about and involved with his creatures.¹ It has seemed to others that God’s eternal and immutable knowledge destroys human freedom.² This article does not aim directly at settling such questions; rather its aim is to examine Augustine’s reasons for insisting upon the absolute immutability of God’s being.³ Generally the doctrine of divine immutability is thought to stem from Platonism, and it is sometimes regarded as a philosophical accretion that is not...

To the question, “Why did God create heaven and earth?” Augustine replied at times, “Because he willed to,” and at other times, “Because he is good.” Gilson labels the first sort of answer as voluntarism and the second as Platonism. He says that it “is an easy matter” to reconcile the voluntarism of the first sort of texts with the Platonism of the second sort “since God is the Good and God’s will is God: ‘so that it might be shown that the thing which was made befits the goodness on account of which it was made.’”¹ Boyer admits that...

In 419 or 420 some Carthaginian Christians came upon an anonymous volume that was being read aloud in a square near the harbor and attracting an interested crowd of people. These concerned Christians sent the volume to Augustine and begged him to write a refutation of the work without delay. Hence, the bishop of Hippo wrote the two books of his c. adv. leg.—one of Augustine’s less well known works that has not yet been published in an English translation, but a work, I believe, well worth more attention.¹ This article will first sum up the scholarly opinion with...

For many years and in many books Robert O’Connell has argued that Saint Augustine held at least up to and including the time of his conf. a view of man as a fallen soul, that is, as a soul that has come to be in body and in time as a result of sin.¹ Other scholars have remained unconvinced by O’Connell’s thesis. For example, after examining the evidence, Gerard O’Daly concludes that Augustine did not believe in the soul’s preexistence.² Similarly, in a recent paper, Frederick Van Fleteren claims that O’Connell has led the world of Augustinian scholars into a...

In ep. 166, written to Saint Jerome in 415, Saint Augustine presents an argument to show that the soul is incorporeal. The purpose of this article is to examine and evaluate that argument. Though the argument is an interesting one for a variety of reasons, it has received little, if any, critical attention.¹ Part of the reason for the lack of attention paid to the argument may be the fact that it is based on the sense of touch, so that the argument, if sound, would prove that the souls of animals are incorporeal, though animals do not, of course,...

In quan. 32, 69, Saint Augustine turns to Evodius’s question regarding the number of souls. He admits that he does not know what to say in answer. “I would be more inclined to say that the question should not be brought up at all or at least that you should postpone it for the time being rather than that I should say that number and multitude have no connection with quantity, or that I am presently equal to the task of solving such an involved problem for you” (quan. 32, 69). However, before turning to what he calls a more...

In several texts Augustine speaks of the Word of God as becoming man in order to make men eternal or to free men from time. Though this theme may well be a relatively minor one in Augustine’s treatment of the purpose of the Incarnation, it is one that is interesting both in itself and also, I believe, in terms of what it reveals about Augustine’s Plotinian understanding of the Christian faith.¹ In this article I shall first set forth the texts that I have found in which Augustine deals with this liberation of men from time by the Word. Then,...

At the 14th International Congress of Philosophy held in Vienna in 1968, John Cooper began his presentation by citing the German scholar Max Zepf, who had said of the conf., “The entire work is divided into two parts which seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. The biography of the first ten books is suddenly resolved into a dry exposition of the first chapter of Genesis. Who has not been compelled to shake his head and ask what purpose Augustine could have had in mind when he thus brought together such various materials.”¹ Zepf’s rather critical remarks...