On the metaphysics of the blessed life in the philosophical thought of Augustine

See also: Letter 155, to Blessed Macedonius. Aurelius Augustine The publication includes a study and translation of Augustine's Letter 155. In this work of the "ecclesiastical period" Augustine criticizes the views of the "false philosophers" on the question of achieving beatitude. But it cannot be attributed to the entire tradition of ancient philosophy, as one might assume based on the popular opinion about the adherence of the late Augustine to irrationalism. Through an analysis of the content of the Letter and other related works, it was revealed that in the Letter Augustine negatively evaluates the ideas about the bliss of the philistine consciousness and Stoic teaching. It is also established that he conducts criticism from a neoplatonic position and that it does not attack, but, on the contrary, supports the intellectualism of ancient metaphysics. Achieving beatitude is a central philosophical and theological problem. In a philosophical sense, this is a question of acquiring absolute knowledge, wisdom, which means that the achievement of bliss is directly related to the knowledge of truth. After all, knowledge exists in two forms - theoretical (intelligence) and practical (will), so that truth is the subject of the first, and goodness is the second, and logically there is no will without thinking, and vice versa, which is why truth is good and good is truth. The goal of knowledge facing the subject, the “soul,” is to overcome finitude, conditioned by its opposition to universal substance, and to achieve infinity. In religious thought, the same problem exists as the problem of achieving eternal life 1 . And although in the form of religious consciousness - in representation - the goal of knowledge as the unity of the finite subject and infinite substance is always just ahead, there is only the future, we are interested in the very essence of the question, its content. It must be pointed out that in Augustine’s work as a whole, philosophy and (Christian) religion are opposed not “abstractly”, in form, so that the difference, say, between reason and authority, thinking and faith, is recorded as a one-sided antagonism, but only “really”, in content, i.e. how a certain (false) philosophy and/or (non-Christian) religion is opposed to true philosophy and/or religion 2 . However, the common view on the development of Augustinian thought is this: as Augustine became involved in church life, his views on knowledge as a whole acquired a character in which religious faith played an increasingly decisive role, and philosophical reason lost its former significance. As a result, this approach to the interpretation of Augustine’s spiritual evolution is popular among a number of authoritative researchers, according to which his early “Italian” works are filled with the pathos of intellectualism and conviction in the effectiveness of philosophy as a way to advance towards absolute knowledge, and his mature and later works, on the contrary, severely criticize the rational path of knowledge and even affirm the provisions of irrationalism, fideism and voluntarism. For example, V. Tatarkevich is sure that Augustine “broke with ancient intellectualism” in his work, asserting “the power of the irrational forces of the soul over the mind” [2, p. 302]; that, according to Augustine, “the truth about God, which outgrows human capabilities, can be known not by reason, but by faith” and that “faith is rather a manifestation of the will than the mind, and to an even greater extent a matter of feelings...” [2, p. 302]. A.N. Chanyshev, characterizing the worldview of the Hippo 3, says: “Augustine argues that the will is higher, more important than reason. The highest act of will is an act of faith. Therefore, faith is higher than reason. Voluntarism develops into fideism” [3, p. 400–401]. A.A. Stolyarov, finally, is also convinced that the credo of Augustine’s mature and late work was to irrevocably affirm the primacy of faith over reason [1, p. 69]. Although Augustine's texts may sometimes give this impression, it is superficial. Therefore, our “ultimate task” is to use the example of his Letter 155 (413–414) as a product of the church period to show that Augustine, despite his Christian religiosity, remained committed to the intellectual tradition of ancient metaphysics. Letter 155 is the last in the correspondence of Bishop Hippo with the imperial vicar in North Africa - Macedonia 4. And if in previous letters the correspondents discussed private ethical issues, then in the final letter Augustine treats the general issue of ethics - the acquisition of bliss. Augustine admits that the subject under study was discussed by many philosophers, who, however, did not have a genuine cult of the true God, for they imagined that they could produce a blessed life for themselves, and not receive it from God as the giver of all good. The apparent intrigue is that in his early dialogues Augustine could say that the blessed life is a life in accordance with the best in a person, i.e. with reason [6, 908; 948]; or that it follows reason reaching its goal, which is truly perfect virtue [6, 876]. Thirty years later in “Revisions” [4, s. 69.] Augustine corrects his previous expressions, saying that although reason is the best in man, yet in order to achieve bliss he must live not in accordance with it (for it turns out that he lives in accordance with man), but with God [6, 586 – 587]. However, even earlier - in Letter 155 - the Hippo man apparently gives an even sharper criticism of views on beatitude, similar to his earlier positions. Now, according to Augustine, it is pride and absurdity to believe that people, thanks to themselves, are capable in a state of finitude, mortality, to be “authors and, as it were, creators of their blissful life” [7, 667]. A philosophical “sage” cannot even be considered blessed if he had to endure unbearable suffering and, in order to stop it, committed suicide. Therefore, Augustine exhorts his correspondent to learn to be blessed for now only in hope, for real blessedness is bestowed by God on those who have demonstrated unshakable piety and endured to the end. The leading idea of ​​such an exhortation is that the more a person, in the pursuit of bliss, relies on his own strength, and not on God's mercy, the more delusion he plunges into: a clear echo of the clash with the teachings of Pelagius (411). So, responding to the words of Macedonius, who called Augustine a sage, the thinker says that if he has something of wisdom, then he “received it from God, and did not take it from himself,” and that if he “is worthy of praise in something, it is not by his innate intelligence or merit, but by His grace” [7, 669]. Therefore, he calls to “throw away the vanity and crazy lies of false philosophers,” who imagine that a person burdened with sin can, in order to become blessed, rely on himself, while the best in his nature - reason - cannot free himself from error without divine assistance [7, 669]. However, Augustine's apparent rejection of certain philosophical positions should not be taken as his attitude towards philosophy in general: this logical error pars pro toto 5 underlies the common interpretations of his mature and late work as supposedly a phenomenon of irrationalism, fideism, etc. In fact, Augustine always remained faithful to the metaphysical tradition of ancient philosophy. To make sure of this, let us first of all deal with Augustine’s appeal to Psalm 144:11 - 5 6. In it, the Psalmist appeals to God, praying to free him “from the hand of strange sons, whose lips are vain, and whose right hand is the right hand of unrighteousness” (Ps. 143:11). This appeal is made against a people possessing all sorts of earthly blessings, for the “strange sons” considered the people enjoying temporary bliss to be good, and the Psalmist asserts that the people whose Lord is God are good (Ps. 143:15). Augustine, commenting on the Psalm, notes that finite goods cannot constitute a blessed life and thereby affirms a metaphysical truth common to philosophy and religion: good in its immediate “corporality”, finitude (as the principle of philistine “wisdom”) is subject to denial. However, according to Augustine, true good cannot be limited to the finite spirit of man. Therefore, in the Letter, he points out that although it is reasonable not to associate goodness with “visible bodily happiness,” the people should also not fix it in their souls. Augustine complements the argument with another quote: “Cursed is everyone who places his hope in a man.” At the same time, it is clear that he has in mind the continuation of this verse: “and he who establishes the flesh as his foundation...” (Jer. 17:5). And this means that the “soul” turns out to be an unacceptable principle in achieving bliss, because it has not overcome the relationship to the finite, to the “flesh”, the immediate negativity of which keeps this principle in the element of the changeable, the transitory. Therefore, Augustine declares that the principle of beatitude can only be a universal, unchanging substance - God. But such an assessment of the “soul” as a changeable being, and not abiding in an eternal way, is quite traditional for ancient philosophical thought and for Augustine in his early works. Thus, two decades before this Letter, Augustine, as if addressing the soul ascending to its source, says: “... since you find your nature changeable, cross yourself too” [8, 154] (see also: [6, 1264]). But these words, in their metaphysics, are consonant even with those provisions of the period of maturity, according to which “a mortal man, leading a hard life with changeable spirit and flesh,” is not able to free himself from errors and become blessed, “unless God, the light of minds (lux mentium), helps him” [7, 669]. The epithet "light of minds" used by Augustine in the Letter is of Neoplatonic origin and (with some variations) is found in Augustine throughout his work. Its most notable use is in early sol. , when Augustine, praying to God for assistance in knowledge, calls Him, among other things, “the father of beatitude”, as well as “intelligible light” [6, 870–871]. The example given suggests that the later doctrine he developed about divine grace as a condition for knowing the truth and finding bliss does not at all unilaterally oppose previous philosophical research, but, on the contrary, is rooted in ancient Neoplatonism. M. Erler, by the way, showed that the presence of Neoplatonic themes in the Augustinian concept of grace is manifested precisely in the awareness of the natural weakness of man and in the hope of salvation coming from outside [5], and F. Risch, reviewing Erler, even dared to call Iamblichus “the forerunner of the Augustinian doctrine of grace” [13, 1152]. Augustine himself in the later ciu. says that the Neoplatonists (represented by Porphyry) undoubtedly recognize divine grace [12, 308], and that in this sense the only difference with them is that they did not know divine grace through Christ. This means that by criticizing in the Letter (along with the philistine consciousness) “the philosophers of this age” [7, 670] as those who linked the certainty of the highest good not with the universality of the divine, but with the limitations of the human, Augustine does not mean all of philosophy. Moreover, in his works 7 he even divides the genus of “philosophers of this age” into types, and the basis is precisely the certainty of the good. This basis is fully articulated, and the division itself is most exhaustive in his Letter 118 (410), where he says: “He who seeks how to achieve a blessed life, of course, seeks nothing other than that in which the goal of good lies... that is, in which the highest good of man consists” [7, 438]. It is further noted that the target good can be relied, firstly, in the bodily, and then, according to the thinker, we get the philosophical principle of the Epicureans (in Letter 155 their place is taken by “alien sons”, personifying the philistine consciousness and close to the Epicureans because of their commitment to the sensual). Secondly, the highest good can be located in the human spirit, and then the philosophical principle of the Stoics (who can only be implied in Letter 155 when the term “philosophers of this age” is used) is obtained. But, according to Augustine, there are also those who, opposing the Epicureans and Stoics, see the highest good in God: these are the Neoplatonists [7, 438–440]. From this it is clear that Augustine’s criticism of the “vain talk and mad lies of false philosophers” in Letter 155 cannot be attributed to this latter type of “philosophers of this age.” It should further be pointed out that this criticism is carried out in a philosophical aspect precisely from a Neoplatonic position. It is no coincidence that Augustine recognized that there are “also other philosophers of this age” who “still saw the truth, unshakable, unchanging, inflexible, in which all the ideas ( rationes ) of all created things reside” [9, 776]. So then, when he says that the best for us is God, to whom the soul must cleave in order to be blessed [7, 671–672], and the question arises about the certainty, about the form of this divine substance, then Augustine himself has an answer prepared by the Neoplatonists. Even taking into account the religious “myopia” of these thinkers, this answer for Augustine is philosophically impeccable: God is “eternal life, unchangeable, intelligible, intelligible, wise and making [others] wise” [9, 776]. This assures us that for the mature Augustine, God as a summum bonum 8 has undoubted philosophical significance, for it is posited as a universal self-conscious intellect. Finally, another confirmation that Augustine, even in the later period of his work, did not adhere to irrationalistic and voluntaristic ideas about the nature of the Divine, but retained the intellectualism characteristic of Platonism, is his note in the later retr., where he says that Plato was not mistaken when he said that there is an intelligible world, by which term he called the very primordial and unchangeable reason through which God created [this] peace. Therefore, Augustine even concludes that if someone were to deny this, it would mean that he considers God to have created things irrationally (irrationabiliter) or that when God created or before he created, He did not know what he was creating, since He did not have a rational consciousness of creation (ratio faciendi) [6, 589]. What is the result? Although Letter 155, as a work of Augustine's ecclesiastical period, contains visible criticism of the "vain talk and mad lies of false philosophers" in connection with the question of obtaining beatitude, it should not be attributed to the entire tradition of ancient philosophy, so the popular view of the late Augustine's commitment to irrationalism, fideism and voluntarism is incorrect. Through an analysis of the content of the Letter itself, as well as other works related to it in time and topic, it was revealed that in the Letter Augustine gives a negative assessment of the ideas about the bliss of the philistine consciousness and Stoic teaching. But it was also established that Augustine’s criticism in the philosophical aspect is carried out, in fact, from a Neoplatonic position, which means that, even being an example of his work as a religious writer, it does not attack, but, on the contrary, supports the intellectualism and substantialism of ancient metaphysics. 1. Stolyarov A.A. Augustine Aurelius // Ancient philosophy: Encyclopedic dictionary. – M.: Progress-Tradition, 2008. 2. Tatarkevich V. History of philosophy. – Perm: Perm Publishing House. University, 2000. 3. Chanyshev A.N. Course of lectures on ancient and medieval philosophy. – M.: Higher School, 1991. 4. Augustin. Contra Academicos (Vel De Academicis): Buch 1 / Einleitung und Kommentar von K. Schlapbach. – Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. 5. Erler M. Die helfende Hand Gottes. Augustins Gnadenlehre im Kontext des Kaiserzeitlichen Platonizmus // Die christlich-philosophischen Diskurse der Spätantike: Texte, Personen, Institutionen. – Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008. – S. 189 – 204. 6. Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina / accurante J. – P. Migne. – Parisiis, 1877. – T. 32 [=PL 32]. 13. Risch F. X. Therese Fuhrer (Hg.), Die christlich-philosophischen Diskurse der Spätantike. Texte, Personen, Institutionen, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008 // Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft. – 2011. – N14. – P. 1149 – 1155. Andrey Artemovich Tashchian, Candidate of Philosophy, Associate Professor, Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of History, Sociology and International Relations, Kuban State University; tashchian@gmail.com For illustration, we will cite only the following provisions of Augustine: “Eternal life is the very knowledge of truth” [6, 1331]; “...only that life is blessed that is eternal” [11, 24]; “So, only that life is blessed which is true life, and only that which is eternal is true” [10, 1522]. Without citing the most “philosophical” works of Augustine of the Cassician period, we will point to more mature and more “theological” works: uera rel., 5, 8; mor., 1, 21, s., 43, 9; ciu., 22, 22, 4; praed. sanct., 2, 5. Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, also known as St. Augustine, was a theologian, philosopher, and bishop of Hippo the King in Numidia, a Roman province in North Africa. – approx. ABCs of faith. The surviving epp belong to this correspondence. 152–5, as well as Augustine's lost first letter to Macedonius, which gave it its beginning. “part instead of the whole” (lat.) – Editorial of the ABC of Faith. Here and below, the Old Testament texts are taken in the Vetus Latina version. In addition to ep., 155, see: ep., 118, 13–16; s., 156, 7–8. “the highest good” (lat.) – Editorial of the ABC of Faith.