The Multi-Dimensional Universe of Saint Augustine of Hippo

By Cheryl Kayahara-Bass, Ph. D.

Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest and most influential minds in the history of Christendom, was not only a Bishop and theologian, but the author of arguably the most influential and authoritative 'Grand Unified Theory', in the true sense, in the last two thousand years. Augustine's writings cover not only pastoral and ecclesiastical matters, but wander all over the knowable intellectual universe. Sometimes in large works such as the City of God, and still other times in bits and pieces throughout letters to friends, his topics range from the nature of God and the human soul made in His Image, to early conceptions in physics, the theory of time and space, the nature of evil and its effects on creation, the nature of matter and energy, even physiology, including brain and brain stem theory; anything potentially within the reach of the God-seeking human intellect. These topics were explored often adventitiously, even randomly, as his imagination and the needs of his flock suggested. The Multi-Dimensional Universe of Saint Augustine of Hippo is an attempt to build from the many threads and fragments of Augustine's thought a coherent and unified world view about the universe on a most fundamental level, including cosmological, ontological and theological aspects of his thought, beginning first in a study of the fascinating and complex world of Hellenistic intellectual culture that nurtured his beginnings. Saint Augustine the saint, the cosmologist, the theologian, the logician and even the ancient scientist are linked together in a conception of reality that moves the cultural mind away from both the Greek concepts of the ancient world and even the early Church Fathers into a mature and sweepingly comprehensive new Christian mind for the western Church, both reflecting and feeding the whole new world that was unfolding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cheryl Kayahara-Bass, Ph. D.
• Release date: May 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311936301

Cheryl Kayahara-Bass, Ph. D.

Dr. Cheryl Kayahara-Bass is a Christian philosopher whose primary areas of study are Augustinian philosophical topics, cosmology and philosophy of science. Her dissertation was entitled 'God, Time and Causality, and the Possibility of Time Travel'; a two-part study, first of the history of the conception of time from the early Greek philosophers such as Thales and Heraclitus, through the new understandings of the early Church such as Augustine, then progressing through the nuanced cosmological explorations of the Medieval period that led to modern science, and culminating in the revolution of Einstein's theory of relativity and beyond. The second part explored the nature of spacetime as it is understood in contemporary physics and causal theory, and its implications for the hypothetical possibility of time travel in philosophical, logical, theological and scientific terms (Ph. D. in Philosophy and Intellectual History, Trinity Sem./U. of Liverpool, Summa Cum Laude). Dr. Kayahara-Bass has written extensively on philosophical topics, always in a context of biblical Christian faith, and always gathering in the adventure of human thought and reason back to the judgments and precepts of Holy Scripture.

Book preview

THE MULTI-DIMENSIONAL UNIVERSE OF SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

Cheryl Kayahara-Bass, Ph. D.

Copyright 2016 Cheryl Kayahara-Bass, Ph. D.

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is dedicated to the only wise man I know.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE- My purpose in this book

CHAPTER 1- THE INTELLECTUAL CRADLE OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

Section 1- Casting the Saint as a Philosopher

Section 2- Augustine’s Intellectual Biography

Section 3- Manicheanism

Section 4- The Roman Academicians

Section 5- The Seed of Neo-Platonism

Section 6- Patristic Speculations

Section 7- The Catalyst of Christian Heresies

Section 8- The Augustinian Bridge

CHAPTER 2- THE AUGUSTINIAN MYSTERY: REALITY IN THREE LEVELS

Section 1- Augustinian Metaphysics

Section 2- The Universe in Three Levels

Section 3- Causality and the Levels of Reality

Section 4- The Goodness of All That Is

Section 5- Divine Ideas as Prototypes

Section 6- Spiritual Pre-eminence in Creation

CHAPTER 3- THE NATURE, SCOPE AND ACTION OF EVIL

Section 1- The Place of Evil in the Universe

Section 2- Evil as Ontological Disease

Section 3- Goodness and Mutability

Section 4- From Something to Nothing; the Process of Corruption

Section 5- Possible Inconsistencies in Augustine

CHAPTER 4- APPROACHING THE REALM OF THE DIVINE

Section 1- Augustine’s Epistemology of the Human Reach for God

Section 2- Knowledge of God and Plato’s Categories of Wisdom

Section 3- Knowledge of God Through Creation

Section 4- Speaking About God

Section 5- God the Trinity

Section 6- Neo-Platonist Concepts and the Trinity

Section 7- Augustine’s Conditional Proof for the Existence of God

CHAPTER 5- SOUL AS A NATURE

Section 1- The Nature and Anatomy of Soul

Section 2- The Soul’s Existence

Section 3- A Trinitarian Anatomy of Soul

Section 4- Sensation in Terms of Soul

Section- The Three Levels of Vision

CHAPTER 6- AUGUSTINIAN PHYSICS

Section 1- Augustine’s Approach to the Corporeal Universe

Section 2- First Formal Principles; Measure, Number and Weight

Section 3- Formless Matter- The Stuff of Everything

Section 4- The Structure of the Physical World in Space and Time

Section 5- Metaphysical DNA; Seeds in the Elements

Section 9- Nature and Miracles

Section 10- Conclusion

CHAPTER 7- A PHILOSOPHY OF REDEMPTION; THE TWO CITIES

Section 1- The Direction of the Universe, In and Out of Spacetime

Section 2- The Two Cities

Section 3- The Relation of the Heavenly City to the Earthly City

Section 4- Human Destiny and the Two Kingdoms

Section 5- Summary

Bibliography

PREFACE

MY PURPOSE IN THIS BOOK

I love the great Saint Augustine of Hippo. I wanted to say that first, plain and simple. Augustine was a rare mix of true humility and holiness, conflict and peace, possessed of deep learning, brilliant and nuanced insight, and an unusual breadth of experience. He was certainly not perfect nor infallible; there are many ideas in his writings that are ill-formed and even simply wrong, a truth he confesses to freely in his last work, Retractations, in which he tried earnestly to correct his past mistakes. Augustine viewed his own intellectual life as never finished, but always clearly a work in progress. Yet in a ‘side by side’ comparison with nearly any other Church Father, I still trust his sanctified and disciplined mind, his purity of intention and his simultaneous intellectual and spiritual reach as much, or even more than, the writings of any other saint in the history of the Church. One reason is that the unwavering premises of his work never change; they are drawn consistently from the rock of Holy Scripture, to which all other conceptions must bow for judgment. Yet this does not limit or overly dogmatize his thought but rather expands it to a positively wondrous scope, leaving us captivated, breathless, even occasionally angry and filled with doubt, but always intrigued alongside him as he sought to understand what he believed. I hope for and strive toward a result that is both reasonably exhaustive in a scholarly sense and still as alive and open-ended as Augustine’s agile intellect and imagination. Augustine’s own writing had an ecstatic yet aridly intellectual quality which informs why I choose to ‘write and think Augustine’.

Regarding the subject matter of this book; as my own philosophic concentration has been cosmology and related world-view themes, I elected to attempt to construct a world view from the Augustinian perspective, which is literally infinitely more complex and multi-dimensional than the Grand Unified Theories of modern-era physicists, even of many of those whose physics include religious premises. Augustine speculated in the identical fields as many contemporary scientists such as Stephen Hawking, with whom Augustine is in partial agreement, for example, or Leonard Susskind of the opposing M-Theory, in a long tradition of ancient thinkers to do so. As the Bishop’s cosmological writings were often not systematic but ‘responsorially’ generated, my present project is to glean a consistent and systematic universe from the multitude of both his major and his more adventitiously created works, from both his own writings and those of his intellectual milieu. My approach will be topical, which may be somewhat unlike the manner of most of the physicists whose work this task parallels, but perhaps more like the ancient philosophers who preceded Augustine in their address of the same universe. Also not unlike them, both ancient thinker and much of the contemporary theoretical physicist, Augustine’s thought on the nature of the same reality is only occasionally empirical, or rooted in systematically gathered experiential data. But quite distinctly from either pure theorist or pure empiricist, it pours forth more from his guiding belief in the inerrancy of the pronouncements in Holy Scripture, even about material matters, as it was God, after all, who made that material.

I would also like to comment briefly on my choice to omit an index. I have chosen rather to provide a more-than-ordinarily detailed table of contents, as well as a bibliography and sufficient footnotes, with the hope that these, particularly the table of contents, will more than cover its absence. Hopefully there is also room for further development in the future in this area.

Augustine’s universe unfolds in the context of North Africa’s intellectual climate during the first to fourth centuries A.D.. I begin with a description of those influences that most touched Augustine’s life, either as a part of his own intellectual history or as a catalyst for broader dialectic. Certain topics related to cosmology are developed from Augustine’s as-it-happens, decidedly un-Thomistic approach to philosophy, which often take me far afield, methodologically speaking, from our primary subject matter, but I promise these diversions garner unexpected benefits! Questions posed from the historically pre-existing Neo-Platonist belief system, for example, are answered in the framework of redemption and language of Christian philosophy. Thus, the traditional categories of cosmology, such as space, time, God, matter, form and the possibility of empty void do broadly govern the structure of this book, as they do the history of cosmology from ancient times well into the Middle Ages. For this task, which is essentially to focus and re-direct what is originally wide-ranging, I draw on a large number of Augustinian sources and order them into what I hope is a coherent map of reality. My main sources are The City of God, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, The Confessions, True Religion, The Trinity, On Music and many other letters and sermons, as well as numerous non-Augustinian sources. All are footnoted, sometimes with commentary for the sake of clarity, in case it is not always obvious how some references contribute to the specific point made. It is characteristic of Augustine’s brilliant imagination, and therefore of any attempt to create a unity of his diverse ideas, that all mental roads, however asymmetrical, and whether they be about matter, soul and spirit, lead back to God in Christ. I hope that the overall mind of Augustine’s vision is apparent; a cosmos as seen by the philosopher-saint, interwoven in past, present and especially future, as infinitely dimensioned as Augustine’s biblical premises and dazzling propensity for speculation could make it. My analysis will not and could not be complete; I have had to omit much, but I pray that the reader will continue to pull on those threads that I have begun.

—Cheryl Kayahara-Bass, Ph. D.

CHAPTER 1

THE INTELLECTUAL CRADLE OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

CASTING THE SAINT AS A PHILOSOPHER

Let each person be quick to hear and slow to speak. (Jas 1:19), and in another passage he says, Let not many of you become teachers, my brothers, knowing that you are incurring a more severe judgment. For all of us cause offence in many things. If someone does not offend in word, he is a perfect man. (Jas. 3:1-2) Not even now do I claim this perfection for myself, although I am already an old man. How much less when as a young man I began to write and speak to the people! To such a degree was it my responsibility to have to speak to the people wherever I was, that I was very rarely allowed to be quiet and to listen to others and to be quick to listen but slow to speak.

What remains for me, then, is to judge myself under the one teacher[1] whose judgment of my offences I yearn to escape. I think that there are many who become teachers when they hold different and even contradictory positions among themselves. But when they are all saying the very same thing,[2] they are both saying what is true and not falling away from the teachings of the one true Teacher. They do not offend when they say many things that He said, but when they add their own ideas, and that in fact is how, from much speaking, they fall into error.[3]

These are the words of Bishop Augustine of Hippo, composed near the end of his life in humble retrospect of the over-thousand books and letters written during his lifetime as a priest and bishop at Hippo in North Africa. In all of his vast body of writings his intentions were certainly various, but they had one common motivating thread; they were consistently pastoral and rarely gratuitously speculative, although they did indeed reach into the very highest and deepest areas of speculation possible to the human mind. Augustine was by natural temperament of a more theoretical than practical turn, and perhaps because of this we will also never find him a pragmatist. From the early days of his conversion, he longed to live a retired and materially arid life so that he might spend all of his time pursuing the marvelous effects[4] of philosophy. It was not to be, of course, and his life’s course was not determined by his own yearnings but the needs of the early Church. He was destined to be swept into the life of a priest and then a bishop almost before the waters of his baptism had dried. Yet he did become arguably the most read and certainly one of the most influential philosophers in the Western tradition. Perhaps because of his ‘compelled’ vocation, his specifically philosophical, and here I mean to differentiate from his theological, body of work grew more adventitiously than systematically, as intellectual and doctrinal error forced the need for a Christian response to potential threats to sound doctrine. The majority of his writings, while internally systematic in a certain sense (as were the Greek and Hellenist philosophers in whose works he was trained) were not so in the way we usually understand it, such as in Saint Thomas Aquinas’ much later Summa Theologica. Even Augustine’s major works, not to mention his countless pastoral letters and essays, were usually produced as pressing needs arose, such as in the case of the Pelagian controversy. Many of his genuinely philosophical, and even scientific ideas appear in his sermons and letters, as well as in his more calculated major works such as The City of God and The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Most of the subject matter of these diverse writings was generated by his overriding interest in the relationship between God and the soul, and in the broader schema, with the natural creation. My focus in this book will be mostly the latter, as I attempt to construct a systematic cosmology; that is, an integrated and rationalized account of the existing natures in the universe and the relationships between them, that make up all of reality, from the bits and segments found scattered throughout his works. The sources I have chosen address some admittedly lesser known topics in Augustine. My selection principle and method will entail linking topics such as the ‘levels’ of existence and what that means in Augustinian thought, the nature of time, space, and the void, and qualities of bodies, souls, and of the Divine, into a modestly organized schematic of how reality appeared to the last philosopher of the ancient world, or the first modern one. I trust that this construction will not be a result of too much extrapolation on my part, but is a fair and coherent interpretation from the inexhaustible implications of Augustine’s metaphysics, comprehended against his historical conceptual conditions. It has been said that Augustine authored the intellectual bridge from the ancient to the medieval mind, in the form of the first completely Christian system ever built. So we may find that, even if Augustine’s original desire to ‘do philosophy’ in the traditional sense did not finally come to pass in the way he originally envisioned, an accidental quality of the opus he did produce was that he covered vaster and more varied territory than he could ever have imagined in the early days of his self-cast role as a Christian philosopher.

I will begin with a brief ideological biography of Augustine the man, followed by a survey of his philosophic environment and history, the latter partly because of its intrinsic interest, but primarily to provide context for the responsorial nature of his writings. Augustine’s literary works were normally written as answers to timely questions and conflicts suggested by his pastoral duties in the ideologically diverse world of Roman/Hellenized African worldviews. This was a particularly extraordinarily varied intellectual climate that constantly prodded Augustine’s writings, and so contemporary attempts to understand what he meant by certain ideas are often unavoidably strained or made to appear, usually unfairly, too archaic. Some detailed preamble of his intellectual climate and personal nurture will help to illuminate an understanding of such a complex intellectual personality.

Following this survey, I will construct Augustine’s cosmology, a true Theory of Everything in the contemporary scientific sense, but that includes a reality of literally infinitely broader perimeters than are permitted to those limited to an account from physics alone. The Grand Unified Theory of Augustinian thought is of an integrated and detailed reality that is distinctly Christian, written as an answer to (but not determined by) the canon of questions and categories posed by Greek and Hellenistic thought. This posture of reconfiguration, or the conversion, if you will, of eclectic Hellenism into a purely Christian mind, defined the primary intellectual dynamic that fired western philosophical dialectic for at least the next thousand years. And when Augustinian cosmology is understood as a profoundly unified universal context that also enables the comprehension of a multitude of contingent truths/facts, it offers insight that speaks to the current attempt to interpret an otherwise impenetrable reality.

AUGUSTINE’S INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

Augustine was born Aurelius Augustinus in 354 A.D., at Tagaste in Nimidia, which is now Souk Ahras in Algeria, North Africa. His mother, Monica, was a deeply Christian woman of great faith and great maternal persistence, who was canonized in local popular opinion soon after her death, and the Church long after. His father, a pagan magistrate named Patricius, was baptized a Christian only shortly before his own death. Patricius’ propensity to anger, as well as his adulterous philandering, caused his wife Monica and son Augustine great grief of heart, which seems to have predisposed the latter to a strong relationship with his abused and longsuffering mother. Augustine grew up speaking both Latin and Punic; he spoke the Latin of the Roman Empire, of course, as the language of his classical literature studies at the school in the nearby Madaura, but he also learned Punic from his nurse, the indigenous language of his area of North Africa. At the age of seventeen, he obtained the financial patronage of a wealthy benefactor named Romanianus of Tagaste and moved to Carthage, the nearby large, cosmopolitan seaport city in North Africa. There he studied advanced rhetoric as a preparation for a career as a lawyer or a life in government service. At the Madaura school he became an accomplished rhetorician and remained to teach the same, but he also fell in love with a woman whom he did not marry but who bore him a child, named Adeodatus, or ‘gift of God’.

Being caught up in a rather lazy, misspent youth, Augustine attended a Christian church only infrequently, which he came later to greatly regret. His pride, as he said, found the Christian Scriptures to be childish at first, and he rejected them in favor of Manicheanism[5], a relatively new religion that contained an elaborately mythologized and intellectualized account of good and evil. This more ‘rational’ approach to knowledge, as well as the promise of reward for those able to meet its severe ascetic requirements, appealed to the gifted youth, and he pursued this for a time only to find himself disappointed and still restless. He moved to Rome to make a fresh